How to Use Fire in Minecraft - For Dummies

Fire, in Minecraft and real life, is both helpful and dangerous. It provides light, cooks meat, ignites TNT, and causes damage to mobs. But it can also cause damage to players, burn their belongings and farms, and damage passive mobs. Learning to use fire correctly is vital as you advance through the game.

Crafting and lighting TNT

TNT is the only explosive block in the game. Lighting it on fire, by using flint and steel sets it off. It toggles between a white texture and the normal texture; after the white texture appears eight times, the TNT expands quickly and explodes. The explosion appears random but is determined by a complicated mathematical formula that’s buried in the game’s code.

Encasing TNT in stone blows up an exact 3-x-3 area. TNT, which is often used to blow up large amounts of space, can be lit by other explosions and blows up a couple of seconds afterward. TNT, once lit or activated, becomes an entity and can pass through other entities, though not solid blocks. It also responds to physics and will fall.

A massive TNT explosion from multiple TNT blocks has the ability to crash a server (so be respectful when you’re using other people’s servers).

Players can shield themselves from an explosion by hiding behind obsidian, bedrock, liquids (water or lava, for example), anvils, enchantment tables, ender chests, command blocks, and the end portal frame. Also, hiding in a minecart protects a player (or mob) from most of the damage.

TNT is a critical ingredient in a TNT cannon or arrow cannon, or to rocket-jump (when a player is a human cannonball requiring enchanted armor to survive). In addition to the sheer fun of blowing things up, TNT is an effective mining tool to blast away large areas. TNT is also interactive with redstone and can be used to create traps, including land mines.

The texture of TNT looks like a bunch of dynamite tied together by a white ribbon with the word TNT in the middle. At the top is a bunch of wicks. To craft TNT, you need 4 sand (either red or regular) and 5 gunpowder. Place the gunpowder in the four corners and in the middle, and then place the sand in the remaining squares to create a checkered pattern.

Creating fire with flint and steel

As with Survival mode in real life, the combination of flint and steel is a way to create fire in Minecraft. You can use flint and steel to break blocks by left-clicking or to place fire by right-clicking. It also ignites TNT by right-clicking and can even detonate creepers.

To place fire correctly, you must right-click on top of a solid, fully opaque block or on the sides of a flammable block. Though flint and steel has unlimited durability when breaking blocks, it lasts through 65 right-click fire placements, even if the fire placement is done incorrectly.

Fire placement with flint and steel is often used in the following ways:

• Clear a forest.

• Take down a wooden structure such as a roof.

• Cook animals for food without a furnace.

• Create a barrier between a player and a mob.

• Light netherrack in the Nether.

Flint and steel is often craftable midgame, when a player has mined iron. After that point, its ingredients are usually fairly abundant. It can also be enchanted. The texture is iron in the shape of the letter C on top and a deformed flint texture at the bottom.

Flint and steel is a shapeless crafting recipe. To craft flint and steel, put an iron ingot and a piece of flint in the crafting grid.

Building a fire charge

A fire charge functions like a single use flint and steel because the fire charge is consumed when used (like a used match). The fire charge can be shot from a dispenser, causing 5 points (2 1/2 hearts) of damage to a player.

Though a fire charge causes fire, it doesn’t cause an explosion. The fire charge looks like a circular piece of coal that is glowing. You can get all the ingredients from the Nether, which is rather appropriate because, when fired from a dispenser, it looks like a blaze or ghast fireball. Consequently, the fire charge can be used to light a nether portal.

The recipe for a fire charge is shapeless. To craft a fire charge, you need blaze powder, gunpowder, and coal or charcoal.