Magma in Minecraft: Lava Mochaccino

Aaand welcome to another Minecraft article about lava.  It occurred to me that I hadn’t properly covered safe handling of lava when constructing- so now it’s time for that.

As I discussed in the prior lava-related article, lava flows five blocks horizontally from wherever it lands on a solid block- in this case a solid block being anything that actually occupies an entire block (this does include fence, but does not include torches and redstone torches).  What’s more, anything that it would not flow horizontally from on top of is actually knocked loose by the flow- and because lava sets on fire anything that touches it, those objects will be destroyed more likely than not.

This is perhaps the first danger of working with lava- setting things on fire and destroying them.

Make sure you’re aware of where lava will flow when you’re working with it.  Have a stack of gravel or sand blocks on hand (dirt if you haven’t got either of those) so that you can create ‘breakwaters’ to keep the lava from flowing into places where you don’t want it.  I use gravel or sand because these blocks are very quick and easy to remove when you need to- either because your construction is done, or because you need to get them out of the way to save yourself.

This is the second major danger of working with lava- setting yourself on fire and dying.

Even in Hard mode, touching lava once and being set on fire will not kill you if you were at full health.  It will, however, take you down to a bit less than half of your health if you had all of your hearts full.  This makes working with lava exceedingly dangerous if you let yourself stay hungry or get hurt- so make sure to have plenty of an easily-replaceable food with you when you use lava in building.  In fact, because of the danger of death and dropping your things into lava, you should make sure that you only carry things you consider disposable with you when you are working with lava.  This will keep you from suffering large setbacks when you die (and you most likely will at least once) from the material you work with.

Fortunately, lava only flows five blocks horizontally, unless you give it another downwards drop (which refreshes the flow distance, just as with water).  This means that your ability to remove and replace blocks gives you just a little bit more reach than the lava flow has.  This is both a bad thing and a good thing.  On the up side, it means you can mess with things around the lava source block or the start of the horizontal lava flow without having to stand in or build over the lava.  On the down side, your reach is only barely longer than the distance the lava will flow- so it’s still dangerously easy to accidentally step into the lava anyways and set yourself on fire.

Of course, you need to have a water pit (or ‘bathtub’) handy to properly deal with this- unless it’s raining and you’re outside in it while you work with the lava, the only way to stop being on fire other than letting it burn out (and possibly kill you) is to jump into water.

Remember, lava is dangerous- treat it with respect, though, and you can make sure it’s more dangerous to things that want to kill you (or people who want to break your stuff) than it is to you.