In Minecraft, nothing is telling you what to do or how to do it. However, there are several types of building materials, crafts, and projects that by and large are not considered worth it considering how little use they are or how much effort they require.
- Note blocks. It takes huge redstone circuits to make even small songs using them.
- For all intents and purposes, any base more glamorous than a dirt shack or a hole carved out from a mountain's side is impractical; the resources that go into fancier houses can usually be put towards gameplay progression.
- When it comes to building, concrete provides the purest form of color in the game, using an almost monotone texture of a chosen dye. But the process is a fair bit more complex than the other dyed blocks — a full 64-stack of colored concrete requires 32 gravel and sand on top of the dye you're using, and you have to place them all in water to get it to solidify. In contrast, wool is easily farmed off shearing sheep, and terracotta is plentiful in the badlands and can be traded for from masons (it can also be acquired by transforming mud into clay, although this method is very convoluted when large quantities are necessary, being made simplest by automation which itself falls under this trope).
- Obsidian. It's the strongest block in the game that can still be mined and is explosion-proof. That's where the good ends. It can only be mined with a diamond or netherite pickaxe, which takes about ten seconds per block. Obsidian is only created when water runoff hits a lava source block, converting the latter into obsidian. Lava is not all that common outside the Nether, so any large structure would require multiple trips just to find the lava required (renewably acquiring lava by using pointed dripstone and cauldrons is a very long process). Another option is to mine the obsidian pillars at the End, which requires defeating the Ender Dragon and completing the game first. An alternative to mining it is to collect it in buckets and use other blocks to create molds (this is an extremely useful method of building a portal to the Nether without diamonds), but lava buckets don't stack so this takes a while. On top of all this, it's a rather ugly building material for most types of projects, since it can't be converted into nicer-looking blocks the way cobblestone and other basic building materials can.
- Averted in multiplayer servers with griefing enabled. The explosive-proof quality of the block shuts down TNT, basically the default tool of destruction on Minecraft, forcing would-be griefers to resort to the much more expensive and less reliable Wither as a way to destroy your build, which usually still leaves enough of your base standing for rebuilding to be possible. On factional servers, an obsidian base also works to no-sell TNT cannons during sieges. Anarchy servers heavily avert this trope for this reason, and obsidian is a common feature of a lot of public infrastructure and builds (of which due to duplication glitches they have a near unending supply of).
- Brick blocks (made of actual bricks) were a bad offender, although they have been improved in this regard (see below). Brick is smelted from clay balls, which are obtained by mining clay blocks with a shovel. Clay isn't an abundant resource, usually being found in medium quantities in areas with shallow water, meaning you need to find lakes or rivers to find it. Each block drops four balls when mined, which must then be smelted into four bricks to form a red brick block. In other words, it takes four times the fuel to make brick blocks than it does other similar blocks, and having Silk Touch doesn't let you get around it. Even then, its only benefit is appearance; it is functionally identical to other brick types in terms of resistance. Compare this to terracottanote , which is obtained by smelting the whole block in a way similar to other materials and can be dyed; there's no practical reason to make bricks when terracotta is four times cheaper and has a wider variety of colors. Terracotta also generates naturally in the badlands biome, practically negating the need to even collect and smelt raw clay. Dyed terracotta can be smelted further to make glazed terracotta, creating different patterns depending on the dye, whereas bricks only come in one variety. The only downside of terracotta over bricks is that the former can't be cut into stairs, slabs, and walls.
- Averted as of 1.14. Masons make trading for bricks incredibly cheap (1 emerald for 10 bricks).
- The addition of lush caves in 1.18 also contributes a lot to the ease of access to clay and (by extension) bricks.
- Quartz makes for an utterly gorgeous block and has a number of versatile variants to make some great Crystal Spires and Togas style builds. Unfortunately it is obtained by gathering nether quartz, and combining four of these into one single block. Even with full Fortune on a Netherite Pickaxe, you can expect to spend hours strip-mining The Nether to get enough for a build, constantly burning out tools or spending Mending on them and mob-grinding to charge them back up, and you are one (1) misstep or mis-click away from a gainer into a pool of lava and losing everything. If nothing else, at least you can buy quartz and quartz pillars, one block at a time, from a master-level Stonemason, but this means faffing about with villagers and grinding for emeralds.
- Similarly, copper is a downright gorgeous block with a number of "oxidized" variants and patterns, allowing for an entire colourful build to be made of one block type. However it necessitates mining for copper, smelting it into ingots, and then combining nine into each block. Copper is incredibly common, yes, but this still necessitates hours of caving and mining and fighting mobs to get enough for even a small build. You also need a honeycomb to stop it from oxidizing, you need to wax every single block one by one, and the oxidation process takes time where you need to actively wait for it to get to the state you want and then wax it, and lightning strikes can burn it off.
- Sea Lanterns are a beautiful source of light that goes with just about any block type, but the only renewable source of them are killing Guardians to get 4 prismarine shards and 5 prismarine crystals. They only have a 40% chance of dropping latter so you can expect, on average, to have to kill around 7 or 8 of them to get even a single sea lantern. If you've never been tempted to use the /give command, you've never built with sea lanterns.
- Until the Nether Update let them be used as a means to pacify piglins, golden equipment was little more than a Joke Item. The tools are the fastest in the game and all gold can receive better enchantments than anything else, and they all look really cool, but that was about it. Gold is even less durable than wood and can't mine any ore except coal and quartz (and Nether gold ore, but that wasn't added until the Nether Update as well), making it the only level of tools that can't even collect their own material!
- TNT provides endless fun for rigging up minefields, self-destruct systems, and even artillery cannons. But it almost always requires great caution and planning to set up anything more complex than a basic pressure plate mine. In addition, restocking on TNT requires hunting down considerable numbers of creepers for the required gunpowder. And if that isn't enough, TNT remains one of the only artificial blocks endermen can still pick up and place. For general use, TNT is good to destroy a wall or the like if you are mining, but small explosions don't break enough blocks to justify their use and large explosions run the risk of destroying any minerals you intend to obtain. Even the one thing it would be good for, mining the highly-valuable and blast-proof Ancient Debris which is surrounded by low blast-resistance netherrack, is rendered null and void since beds explode in The Nether... with a larger blast radius and for the much more economic cost of 3 wool and 3 wood each.
- Any project in Survival Mode that involves large amounts of lava permanently placed, especially one's home base. Yes, it looks awesome to have a skull fortress weeping lava-falls, but it's highly dangerous and one misstep can potentially kill you and melt all your valuable gear. Even if you build very carefully and never fall in by your own devices, you can still get knocked into it by hostile mobs (skeletons firing arrows, for example), and anything that compromises the integrity of your structure, like creeper explosions or endermen removing just a single block, can cause an escalating disaster. You can build fortifications and defenses to keep most mobs far away, but endermen can run in whenever they please, even when you're not there to fend them off. Furthermore, while you can obtain an infinite water source with just two buckets of water, lava does not fall under the same rule so you'll have to manually farm your lava with buckets that become non-stackable when you put anything in them. Finally, if you have any flammable stuff placed near the lava, expect it to burn up and spread the flames.
- Composite blocks made from ingots and/or gems (iron, gold, diamond, emeralds), when using them for anything except compacting mineral storage: it takes nine pieces to make a block, so in Survival, you have to mine a massive amount of ore if you want to use them as a building material. Inversely, however, compositing the raw materials themselves can allow one to haul literal thousands of pieces of coal, iron and gold on their person without the aid of Shulker Boxes. Even as compact mineral storage there is the issue of not having minerals in multiples of nine, which can cause you to waste more inventory space than if you didn't turn them into blocks
- Related to them, beacon pyramids. They look pretty darn cool (especially with the Pillar of Light) and provide some useful boosts, including movement speed, mining speed, and health regeneration. That said, these bonuses only apply within a somewhat small radius; getting the maximum 50 blocks of effect area requires a whopping 164 mineral blocks (1476 ingots and/or gems) plus a beacon, requiring that you kill enough wither skeletons to get 3 skulls and defeat the Wither for its Nether star (so by making a pyramid, you basically prove that you didn't need one to begin with). Most of the effects are mediocre at best, as well — Strength, Resistance, and Regen are all unneeded since the area around your base is probably fully lit and warded off from monsters, and Jump Boost isn't useful at all. Perhaps the only one that's practical is Haste, which can be useful for future large-scale mining projects, but that's it.
- A basic iron farm will produce less iron than you can mine in an hour while more advanced ones that produce massive amounts of ingots require a considerable amount of time and resources to build. Either can provide a decent passive income of iron, but unless you want to build something that needs a ton of iron, such as a beacon, you'll generally have way more iron than you'll know what to do with.
- Relatedly, most overly complicated food farms end up being this considering the amount or resources you need to put into them to get a yield that's better than what you can do by hand. Even a 5 by 5 block farm of carrots or potatoes, which will take less than a minute to harvest and replant, will provide more food than you realistically will ever need.
- Skeleton horses may seem cool, but they can't be bred for better stats, their health is always the minimum for a horse and you cannot equip them with horse armor to increase their survivability. They're also very rare to obtain — a single "trap" horse is spawned during thunderstorms and when approached, it's struck with lightning which despawns it and replaces it with four skeletons in enchanted armor riding four of them. You of course have to kill the skeletons (and not the horses) if you want a chance to obtain one. The only benefit to own one other than cosmetics is their ability to be ridden underwater, or their undead nature if one were to play on a server where Wither spawning is allowed (as Withers do not target Skeleton Horses or their riders) such as anarchy servers.
- Horses in general are one of the faster modes of transportation in the game and are fairly durable, and the whole idea of having a Cool Horse would sound like it would make for a great playing experience. However, they're mostly only effective in traveling through flat, grassy areas such as plains, savannas, and deserts. They can't swim, nor can they travel through one-block openings and their climbing mechanics are the same as yours, so good luck trying to drag one through dense vegetation, swamplands, rivers, and mountains, and god forbid if you accidentally fall into a hole. To top it off? They also don't care to stay in one place or follow you around like wolves and cats, and have the tendency to wander off. The only way to make a horse stay in one place is with lead and a fencepost, wasting precious space in your already small inventory. Mules and donkeys do have the added appeal of being able to carry chests while you ride them, but they can only carry one, and they don't move nearly as fast as horses. In addition, once you beat the Ender Dragon and start getting a fully enchanted elytra, Horse become an afterthought (elytras are much, MUCH faster, far more mobile by being able to cross all kinds of terrain, and able to access vertical areas more easily.)
- On Java Edition (Bedrock avoids most of these problems), the fire damage from Fire Aspect can seem helpful at first glance, but the Impractical part comes when a Zombie decides to set you ablaze with its dying breath. It's also completely useless underwater and can interfere with the Looting enchantment — if a mob burns to death instead of you dealing the final blow, Looting won't trigger. It also makes obtaining ender pearls very cumbersome, as Endermen teleport away upon being set on fire. Doesn't help that you can get the Flame enchantment on a bow which does the same thing at a distance, eliminating the former risk and rendering the latter two issues moot as Endermen are immune to arrows and you can't get Looting on a bow anyway. Apart from PVP where the extra damage can make or break a match, the only real practical use for Fire Aspect is killing farm animals so the meat's already cooked.
- The Thorns enchantment passively damages enemies when they hit you. Sounds great when you're outnumbered and need to thin out enemies quickly, but what's not stated is that it causes your armor to wear out faster when it does this, practically mandating the Mending enchantment, a very rare treasure enchantmentnote , just to keep up with the increased wear and tear. A mob killed by Thorns damage also invalidates any additional drops that would have been gotten through a sword with Looting. Finally, there are cases where you don't actually want to hurt an enemy (for example, a zombie villager that you want to heal), so any source of damage without player interaction may be undesirable.
- Tridents are a two-in-one melee and ranged weapon. Sounds like the perfect weapon on paper, but in the field, it's anything but. Not only is it less effective than just using a bow and sword separately, but it's a lot harder to get your hands on as well. You can only get them as a very rare drop from drowned, an ocean-exclusive mob that only spawns with them 15% of the time, whereas you can just simply craft a sword and bow from commonplace materials. When you finally do get a trident drop, it will almost always be heavily damaged — the only way to repair them is to grind out more drowned for additional drops or use the incredibly rare Mending enchantment. Even when fully repaired, it only has as much durability as an iron tool. Finally, if you don't want to lose your precious trident, you have to run and retrieve it every time you throw it, which often results in you putting yourself right in the middle of danger — something you'd rarely have to worry about when using a bow and arrows. Enchanting the trident with Loyalty makes it return your hand when thrown so you don't have to run to retrieve it, but this means that you need to take more effort to enchant it before it even becomes good for regular use, as opposed to your mundane weapons that are functional from the moment you craft them.
- The Channeling enchantment, unique to tridents, makes it so that whichever mob is hit by the thrown trident is hit by a thunder bolt! The catch? The enchantment only works during a rare thunderstorm, and the mob must have no blocks (except air) between it and the sky. This means that in most situations where a Channeling trident's high DPS may be useful, its special ability cannot be used. However, its ability to make lightning fall on command when paired with a lightning rod makes it useful to charge creepers in a controlled environment to kill other mobs for their heads.
- Snow golems may be cheaper to build than iron golems, but are also considerably less useful. While having your own personal guard in your base is pretty cool, they deal no damage; thus, simply placing them as sentries is useless because all they'll do is draw aggro from mobs and probably get shot to death by skeletons. Worse yet, they can also attack creepers, who will retaliate the only way they can: by exploding and leaving a crater in your build. To top it off, they'll just melt to death if they're present in locations that are too warm like the Nether, unless you spent fire resistance potions on them to temporarily halt their melting. They're only really useful when used as a decoy, or to lure enemies into a trap.
- Cake. A food source that can be placed down and eaten in slices? Pretty cool! But, it takes lots of resources from multiple sources to create (chickens for eggs, cows for milk, wheat, and sugarcane are all source ingredients), is annoying to craft by milk buckets not being stackable, the inventory item cannot stack, it can't be moved, and while eating a whole cake provides the most hunger points of any single item, it doesn't hold a candle to even a complete stack of potatoes nor will it last as long.
- Rabbit stew, which is a shade more awesome than cake but hits many of the same pitfalls. It heals the most hunger out of any item in the game just short of cake, and has the third-highest saturation of any item as well, but has the same resource dilemma. It requires rabbit, potatoes, carrots, and mushrooms, some of these items are rarer than cake's requirements, and similarly can't be stacked. To make matters worse, if you take each of the ingredients of the stew and eat them separately, you end up with more hunger restored than just eating the stew, and if you add a non-matching mushroom to make mushroom stew, you can refill your hunger all the way. Furthermore, if you get lucky enough to find a Mooshroom, you can infinitely milk it for free mushroom stew, rendering the entire song-and-dance of crafting rabbit stew a complete waste.
- The Totem of Undying sounds like a great item, but there are a few issues with it. The first is getting one — it only drops from the Evoker that either spawns during raids or lives in a woodland mansion, a rare structure which you can only find either by wandering the world endlessly or locating a cartographer villager (which not all villages will have, possibly requiring you to build a cartography table and breed villagers or destroy other workstations to get one) and trading lots of stuff with them until they offer a map to the place. Once you have it, there are still some major drawbacks. For it to do anything, you can't simply carry it in your bag, or put it on your hotbar; you have to hold it in your hand, meaning you can't use a shield (or a weapon if in your main hand, which is even worse), ironically making it more likely that you'll die and use up the totem. Also, when it does activate, it doesn't restore you to full health, it just restores half a heart and gives you temporary regeneration... so you're likely to immediately die again to whatever killed you the first time. It's probably most useful to have in the Nether, because it also gives you fire resistance when it activates, potentially saving you from burning up if you fall into the ocean of lava. As for its ability of revitalization, it's probably only useful if it's used on a Hardcore world, since that is the only game mode where respawning is prohibited, or on servers where One-Hit Kill weapons are prevalent (such as anarchy servers or ones with modded weapons).
- Blackstone can be substituted for cobblestone in some recipes and can be crafted into a polished variant for decoration; however, blackstone is found in abundance only in basalt deltas, bastion remnants, underground in the Nether, or by chance in a Piglin barter. It is far more practical to import several stacks of cobblestone from the Overworld to the Nether to have a steady supply of stone for tools or to build a ghast-proof Nether base.
- Crossbows can be loaded with firework rockets to function as an impromptu rocket launcher. However, firework rockets launched this way can only detonate if they've been built with at least one firework star. It's a careful balancing process to decide how many stars you want (for damage) versus how much gunpowder you use (for range), and it's all moot if your projectile misses anyway. Oh, and shooting a firework rocket consumes triple the normal durability on top of all thatnote — better hope you put Mending on your crossbow at some point. It's usually simpler to use arrows with your crossbow, especially in situations where an explosion can draw unwanted anger.
- Lingering potions. In addition to being used to craft tipped arrows, they can be thrown to lay down an area effect cloud that gives a potion effect to any entity that strides into it, such as using a lingering potion of harming as an effective area-denial tool. The main drawbacks, however, is that one potion only makes eight tipped arrows, and when the potion itself is used as a thrown weapon, the effect clouds only last for a couple of seconds and shrink whenever someone gains an effect from them. Worst of all, they require the Ender Dragon's breath to brew, making for a prohibitively expensive trip to resurrect her whenever your supply runs low.
- Jungle trees grown in a 2x2 pattern produce more wood than any other type of tree. Even a single tree chopped down is worth a couple stacks of logs, compared to an average of 10 for normal trees. The impractical part comes from jungle trees being the rarest type and typically situated a fair distance from your spawn point. They also drop saplings at half the rate, so even a full grown tree has a chance of dropping less saplings than were used to grow it. While this can be remediated with a hoe with Fortune, which all but guarantee you'll have enough saplings for at least one more large jungle tree, harvesting them for large amounts of wood still qualifies. Indeed, huge spruces are easier to farm with their more abundant foliage, and as a bonus are easier to harvest thanks to their lack of branches.
- Sponges provide an effective means of draining water from places, but are dodgy to use thanks to the way water flows and refills blocks. They also only appear in small quantities in Ocean Monuments, underwater structures that are swarming with Goddamned Bats that inflict the Mining Fatigue status ailment. Furthermore, they also need to be dried out after each use, either by cooking them or placing them in the Nether. For small amounts of water draining, you're better off using a stack of sand or gravel, and for large amounts of water draining, you're better off building a simple redstone flying machine to displace water — unless you're playing in Creative with unlimited sponges they're just really not worth using.
- Music discs provide nice ambient music in your house but both ways to get them are pretty impractical. Your two ways of getting them are from loot chests, and the chance of finding them is 21.8% at the highest and 2.4% at the lowest. You can also get them by having a Skeleton, Stray or Command spawned bow wielding Wither Skeleton kill a creeper, which means dodging a sniper with highly accurate precision and a walking explosive. Oh, and the creeper will explode if it gets to the skeleton, preventing it from dropping music discs, and they will not drop Pigstep, 5, Otherside and Relic.
- Diamond and especially Netherite beacons are this. Iron, gold and emeralds can both be obtained with relative ease and work fine for beacons, making diamond and netherite beacon bases a really pretty waste of resources that could be best put towards endgame gear.
