Minecraft Combat- Archery (Part One)

Archery is a curious skill in Minecraft.  The tool is a bit difficult, if intuitive, to make, arrows are scarce and oddly limited, and for a game of Minecraft’s simplistic nature, aiming properly is curiously realistic.  Still, it’s a useful option to have in your utility belt, giving you a decent way to dispose of creepers without getting close and, in some circumstances, spider jockeys.  It’s even more useful when you’re dealing with Ghasts, who can’t be relied on to stay where you can actually hit them in melee.

The bow is the basic component of archery.  You can find one by killing a skeleton sometimes, but it’s usually better to make your own- all it takes is three sticks and three pieces of string.  Put a diagonal line across the crafting table’s crafting space, made of string, then pick one side of the string and fill it in with wood- presto, you have a bow.  This is the easy part and, with the ease of getting wool off of sheep, the most reliable part of archery.

Arrows are a lot more finicky.  There are two ways to get arrows as well- again, skeletons can drop them, but with only one to three arrows per skeleton you just aren’t going to get enough arrows that way while still actually using your bow.  The natural alternative is to craft them, and that’s where things get a touch dicey.  The stick part of the arrow is easy, but the ends are relatively hard to come by.  To put the fletching on your arrows, you need feathers- and that means chickens.  Since you can only get feathers off chickens by killing them, and there’s no guarantee that each chicken will drop any feathers (and more than one feather per chicken is unheard of), you have to breed and raise chickens if you plan on using arrows with any real regularity (a must if you plan on completing The End).

The heads of the arrows are made of flint, and flint is even harder to come by- you can only get it when digging up gravel, and it only appears sometimes.  The best way to make this work is create a space to repeatedly fill up and dig out and just use the same gravel blocks over and over until you turn them all into flint, but even with this to accelerate your work, it takes a long time to get enough flint for a good stock of arrows, and a lot of digging (and a lot of gravel you’re destroying).  Don’t use shovels for this, you’ll run through them like water through a seive.