Block of the Week

One central island of the stuff is surrounded by an expanse of nothing, then encircled by more islands, where you will find the mysteriously crooked end cities and shulkers, clustered among the purpur.

Strong almost beyond compare and able to stand huge blasts, glossy, black obsidian is forged in the very fires of the earth. What a block! But real obsidian is a little different to the powerhouse you know in Minecraft.

A NASA spacesuit, with a thin layer of protective gold in the visor. How cool is being an astronaut? You literally wear a golden helmet to work.

As you’re digging through the deepslate, you’re still likely to encounter the ores that you find above – they just take longer to mine, because the rock surrounding them is harder. Be wary, though – if a block of deepslate crumbles quickly under your pick, it’s probably full of holes dug by silverfish, and these strange creatures will likely attack.

Sure, once created, those three books have transformed into a veritable library which textures four faces of your bookshelf. But to really build out your collection, you’ll need to invest in an entire farmstead dedicated to cultivating cattle for the leather and sugar cane for the paper. Best build it near a forest, too, for all that wood you’ll need.

The default tuning of note blocks is F#, which is kinda odd. There aren’t many man-made instruments tuned naturally to F#. So we asked Samuel Åberg, Mojang’s lead sound designer, what the deal is.

One nifty trick is to use them in redstone circuitry. Delaying an item falling onto a pressure plate or into a hopper can add a longish pause – about 25 seconds – before the effects of a circuit activating. You could use that feature to keep a door open for a while before closing it again, for example.

If you want some, you’ll need a block of wood or hyphae, stripped or otherwise. Plonk it into a crafting grid and it’ll yield four planks of the same variety. You can also find planks of various sorts all over the Overworld, as part of naturally-generated structures like mineshafts, villages, and shipwrecks. Gather with an axe for mAXEimum efficiency. I know, I'm hilarious!