Minecraft – Crafting a Crafting System: How We Make Minecraft – Episode 2

Dare you join us for another journey into the minds that make Minecraft? [CRICKETS] Undeniably fascinating. Welcome to How We Make Minecraft! When Minecraft launched in early access in 2009, it actually launched without crafting. Luckily, modern Minecraft is all about the crafting.

Here’s a variety of buildings I’ve crafted over the years from my impressive portfolio. But why is crafting so satisfying? Imagine it as the difference between buying a table and crafting your own table. Buying a table is quick, easy, maybe even a little exciting, but ultimately an impersonal, fleeting transaction.

But the act of building that table can give your life purpose and meaning. Hopefully not for the first time. Sure, your homemade table may not have the correct amount of legs, and this keeps happening when you put plates on it. Nevertheless, it’s not just any table – it’s your table.

Everything is more satisfying when you do it yourself. That’s why I never go to the hospital and instead do all my open-heart surgery on myself at home. It’s just more rewarding – spiritually, if not physically. But what makes our crafting work?

One of the first things you see in Minecraft is the crafting grid. This is too small to build a lot of the stuff in the game. So we should change it to a bigger grid, right? Argh! My eyes! Get this blasphemy away from them!

Ah, that’s better. The 2×2 grid is designed to encourage you to experimentally place things in it, but not be too intimidating. It’s the first step of progression in the tech tree of the game, and hopefully it won’t be long until you discover the second step –

One of Minecraft’s most basic recipes, the crafting table. It’ll give you access to a new crafting grid that’s a gigantic, gargantuan, mega huge size of Three by three! I know, I’m scared too. What do you think is the most unintuitive crafting recipe in Minecraft?

Let us know in the comments, and we’ll try not to cry …when we read them alone at 3am. [SOBBING] Here, we’re telling the player that five wooden materials will give you a wooden pickaxe. If, however, we made it so you needed five

Feathers to craft a wooden pickaxe – well, that logic doesn’t really track. Not only is it bad news for the local chicken population, it’s going to annoy players and make them lose faith in the logic of our crafting system. We’ll end up with millions of angry unwilling feather collectors protesting our offices,

And nobody wants that, least of all me. I’m very ticklish. Please leave me alone. Let’s say we finally answered fan demand, and added the keyboard to Minecraft. So, what would the crafting recipe look like? I’ve gone with three note blocks in the middle, a u-shape formation

A bit like the shape of a keyboard, and two obsidian blocks for legs. Hopefully that’s enough visual hints to help the player figure the recipe out for themselves. If the keyboard just used a common block, like wood, then it becomes one of the easiest and therefore most commonly constructed items in Minecraft.

This doesn’t just make it less special, it also breaks the structure of the game. Good luck surviving your first night, if our stupid design choices have misled you into building a bunch of keyboards to defend yourself with. [STEVE FRANTICALLY PLAYING KEYBOARD] [CREEPER HISSING] [MASSIVE EXPLOSION]

When it comes to item durability, Minecraft can be a bit of a bully. It feels like you’ve barely dug up anything before we snap your shovel or pick apart your pickaxe. But we’re not doing this solely to be mean,

We’re incentivizing you to seek out rarer, more powerful materials, that you can use to build stronger, more durable equipment. Smashing all your wooden toys is how we’ve decided to do it. Heh heh heh heh. I’m sorry. The structure of crafting hasn’t really changed much in Minecraft,

And that isn’t just because we’re lazy. We know other crafting games give you a lot more options. But in Minecraft, we only let you place one block at a time, and we lock you into a first person perspective,

Even though it’d be easier to press a Mobbo button that makes Mobbo craft for you. [KAZOO SOUNDS] No Mobbo, no! It may seem like we’ve made a massive oversight, by not giving our players massive oversight, but that’s by design. This way makes it

More immersive, and we think more fun. If we had you just clicking through menus to place blocks en masse, then Minecraft could quickly stop feeling like a game and more like filling out a tedious spreadsheet. Hands-on crafting is the core gameplay loop that we think

Makes Minecraft special. When you finish a build like, say, this epic castle, we want you to look upon your masterpiece knowing you placed every block and crafted every tool. We’re not saying this approach is the correct way to do a crafting system,

Otherwise all the other cooler crafting games might stop talking to us, but it’s our approach and we think it’s a crucial part of Minecraft’s success. And there you have it! What would you like us to cover in the next episode? Let us know in the comments.

Oh, but make sure you write “how much shampoo do the developers use”, because that’s what the next episode is about. See you next time.