Insane Experiments: Testing Minecraft’s Torch Recipe IRL

Yes let’s go this is a real life minecraft torch and it works exactly as you’d expect lighting without the need for any external heat but is this really possible with just coal in a stick or how far do you have to stray from minecraft’s recipe for this to work irl

Of the over 250 minecraft recipes that can be made without a crafting table the torch is likely the most iconic requiring only a stick and a piece of coal or charcoal no serious player would be caught dead exploring without at least a handful of torches in their hot bar

It’s a simple recipe for a simple item but if you tried it in real life with this thing even light i was determined to find out so i headed to a local forest in search of some specially shaped sticks the minecraft torch recipe includes no way to attach the coal but

If it’s split in just the right way i found that friction did a decent job of holding the fuel on testing began immediately using a blow torch as a source of external heat so let’s see if you can even light this thing so far we’re getting nowhere there are

Little like flakes chipping off and stuff i’ve no earthly idea why that is happening despite blasting the coal with immense amounts of heat i couldn’t get this stuff to light or at the very least i couldn’t get it to stay lit next i tested charcoal and for this i just used store-bought briquettes

Holy crap dude that technically worked holy crap i did not think that would work at all the results literally blew my mind they seemed too good to be true and as it turned out they were does it smell like lighter fluid these brick hats were laced with lighter

Fluid which is why i smelled petroleum as soon as i blew it out which meant i needed to repeat the test and since i now saw kingsford charcoal as dubious at best i would need to make it myself a process which turns out to be pretty simple and

It’s surprisingly accurate to what we see in minecraft but more on that in a bit drilling a paint can in public got me some pretty strange looks but it worked pretty darn well to create some charcoal with which i could retest the torch and the results here were well

It seems to be lighting and then going out but interestingly you can kind of blow on it and get it started up again i chose a particularly porous piece of wood meaning that lots of air could flow through it and this resulted in a surprisingly well sustained burn

But not a sustained flame it was releasing tons of heat however almost none of that was actually converted into light making this torch rather useless in a minecraft type situation but if you know me i’m not about to go down without a fight so it was time to start on phase two

Phase two meant processing our fuel in ways not explicitly shown by minecraft but which are realistically possible with the game’s technology and only the ingredients shown in the recipe the challenge is that both fuels here require a sustained amount of heat in order to stay lit coal and charcoal aren’t usually used

For their flammability but instead for their heat output i tried grinding the coal in the charcoal reasoning that if i increase the surface area of either fuel i’d also increase the heat retention however in practice this logic didn’t really work out and i wasn’t really sure how i’d be able to

Apply this to a torch style setup i needed a different option so i began looking into ways of processing kohler charcoal to create a liquid fuel when it comes to coal while technically coal liquefaction is possible it requires highly specialized industrial machinery definitely not something that minecraft steve could get his hands on

So i turned back to charcoal where my search led me to pitch it turns out that in the process of creating charcoal from highly sappy pine wood pitch can be rendered out similar to how fat is rendered when making bacon with the second bigger paint can and a

Small bundle of sappy pine wood i made a fire and got to work on my second batch of charcoal charcoal is made by partially combusting wood in an environment that contains little to no oxygen essentially you’re breaking down wood into its constituent parts removing nearly everything and leaving the carbon it contains

The result is a lightweight porous form of carbon which we call charcoal during this process if sap rich wood is used you can also render that out in the form of pitch before i started i made a hole in the bottom of the upper paint can while removing those other impurities

The sap is also pulled out of the wood dripping down into the smaller paint can placed below this sap is known as pitch and it’s a highly flammable liquid that solidifies at room temperature making it easy to store and use not to brag but i pretty much

Nailed it on my first batch and i started testing different kinds of torches one that’s just a stick one that uses paper and one that uses rags so you can see that this is a really highly flammable liquid and so technically right there we have minecraft’s torch but this just won’t

Last very long i want to see if we can do a little better so let’s try the paper towel i’m curious to see this yeah that’s going to burn like nobody’s business and if i had soaked the whole thing it would actually protect the paper itself from burning

Okay now the real torch once again we have created a torch it’s dripping hot tar yes these all work really well so well that i could have stopped here but as the mythbusters famously said if it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing i wanted to match minecraft’s results exactly which meant doing the seemingly

Impossible making a long lasting wood torch that also lights itself ideally with ingredients that are plausible in minecraft in steve’s torch placement animation we can see that he clearly swings the torch before it sticks to the wall suggesting that he might be striking it against something as he’s moving it into place

And while it’s not clearly shown you can imagine that this friction might be enough to set the torch ablaze while pitch is an excellent long burning fuel it’s not nearly volatile enough to light easily from friction alone so we’ll need to give our torch a tip that will help it start a bit

More easily a job best suited for phosphorus see phosphorus was the first element ever scientifically discovered way back in 1669 by a guy named hennig brand who figured out that if you let buckets of piss sit around for a while you can boil it down to a paste

Mix that paste with some sand and ultimately distill white phosphorus which is so reactive that it glows in the dark and even bursts into flames just by reacting with the moisture in the air while phosphorus doesn’t technically appear in minecraft the good news is that steve already has all the tools

Needed to make it himself fire sand and buckets of urine and while white phosphorus is a bit too volatile to be useful its brother red phosphorus is perfect for our torch since it won’t randomly combust in the air but it’ll still light easily with just a little bit of

Friction while phosphorus is notoriously hard to get in the u.s i was able to harvest a bit of red phosphorus directly from the sides of matchboxes to serve as the torch’s primary ignition in combination with some crushed up match heads which will extend the burn time this will achieve the same end

Result as a 100 phosphorous tip but it’s a heck of a lot easier for me to work with and after nearly 10 hours of grinding pasting and gluing i was finally ready to test the torch yes let’s go once the pitch is going nice and steady

This is a real minecraft torch this is fueled by pitch created in the process of creating charcoal it’s viable in the game the only difference is that this uses a supply of red phosphorus to light it from nothing more than friction now if that’s not a real-life minecraft

Torch i don’t know what is thank you guys so much for watching if you like this one make sure to slap a like on it let me know down in the comments if you want to see another video like this one thank you so much to

My patrons who make videos like this one possible you can check that out down at the link in the description and if you just want to hang out in between videos or talk about cool projects you can join the discord which is totally free all right but seriously is

This not the coolest thing you have ever seen look at that that is that’s a real minecraft torch