Operation Manual

CHAPTER 3: Gathering Resources
54
Chests: Safely Stash Your Stuff
Whenever you head away from your secure shelter, there is always a reasonably high risk of
death. Creepers, lava pits, long falls—they can all do you in. Respawning is only a moment
away, but the real danger here is that any items you’ve collected and carry in your charac-
ter’s inventory drop at the location of your untimely death and may prove impossible to
retrieve in the 5 minutes you have to get back to them before they disappear forever.
Chests act as an insurance policy. Put everything you don’t need in a chest before you
embark on a mission, and those things will be there when you get back or after you
respawn.
The natural place to leave chests is in your shelter, but you can also leave them elsewhere,
perhaps as a staging point as you work away in a mine, or even outside. Mobs will leave
them alone, and the only real risk you face is leaving them out in the open on a multiplayer
server or getting blown up from behind by a creeper in singleplayer mode while you’re rum-
maging around inside.
Chests come in two sizes: single and double. A single chest can store 27 stacks of items.
Create a double chest by placing two single chests side by side. The double chest stores up
to 54 stacks of items. Given that a stack can be up to 64 items high, that’s an astonishing
potential total of 3,510 blocks in a crate that takes just 2×1 blocks of floor space. If you’ve
ever followed the Doctor Who TV series, consider chests the Tardis of storage!
Create a chest at your crafting table with eight blocks of wooden planks arranged around
the outside, leaving a space in the middle.
Place and then right-click the chest to open . You can then move items back and forth
between your inventory and the chest. In Figure 3.4, I’ve transferred all the items I don’t
need for the next expedition.
Before you head out, there are two other things you should know: how to avoid monsters
and how to deal with hunger. Read on.