When I started playing Minecraft in 2012 you didn't have any sort of help or guidance when it came to crafting. You had to rely exclusively on your own knowledge, or constantly tab out of the game to look up crafting recipes. It wasn't until the in-game recipe book was introduced in 2018 that I no longer had to rely on the internet to tell me what I needed, but by this point the crafting guide wasn't needed. I had confidently memorised how to craft every single possible item in Minecraft and yes, I flexed that knowledge whenever I could.
But it didn't take long for the sheer number of updates and drops to overwhelm my ability to retain all of this incredibly vital information, and I'll admit, the crafting recipe book has been my best friend as of late. But I didn't quite realise how little I now know about crafting in-game until I played Crafting Loop, a browser game that tasks you with crafting as many items as possible in ten seconds, showed me that actually I do not know a single recipe off by heart anymore.
In my defense, it's not like you can just go in and start by crafting simple things like wooden planks, followed by sticks, and then torches and tools. You know, the classic routine when you start a new world. Instead, you're given a random selection of items to somehow look at and immediately know what to use each of them for, alongside an item you have to craft. I really mean random when I say this too. My first round had two different hoes and a set of iron stairs (among other items) and before I could even finish my thought "what could you possibly craft with a wooden hoe" my timer had already finished.
The thing is, it takes me more than 10 seconds to look at all of the icons, let alone click them and drag them to the crafting table and create something. I'm sure there are people who can instantly scan and know exactly what to create but unfortunately, that is not me. If I was given slightly longer, like 30 seconds or even a minute, I could probably create at least one item rather than just spending the time limit panicking and frantically searching for something like a stick or a bit of cobblestone.
Fortunately, there is a Peaceful Mode for people like me who struggle with the Speed Run 10 second countdown. This doesn't give you a shortened time limit, and only gives you the materials you need to create the item you're being tasked with. Much more my speed, so I confidently breezed through its first few challenges. Until it started asking me to create things like End Crystals which I've never actually done in the game.
With a lot of trial and error I got there eventually and moved onto something I knew a bit better, a Diamond Block, but it has made me realise maybe I never actually knew as much as I thought I did in the first place. If anything, this whole experience has taught me that I ought to buckle down and brush up on my knowledge of Minecraft's far more extensive crafting library ahead of its next significant update. Maybe then I can come back and craft at least one thing in ten seconds.
