Top 10 things with hidden uses in Minecraft

Minecraft has a lot of items and blocks. Updates like the upcoming 1.21 will only give players more to keep track of. This means that even veteran players might have a hard time remembering all of the uses and quirks of the different things found throughout the game's best seeds.

Detailed below are 10 of the most helpful hidden uses of some of the Minecraft's most common blocks and items.

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Top 10 Minecraft items with hidden uses

10) Trapdoors are useful outside of being doors

Trapdoors are pivotal parts of many farms due to this hidden AI quirk (Image via Mojang)

An interesting and useful secondary feature of Minecraft's different trapdoors is that mobs actually register them as full blocks for pathfinding. This means that an open trapdoor can be used to trick mobs into walking into holes.

This is the main mechanism employed in a generic Minecraft mob farm and has been used since the game's very early beta days.

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9) Netherrack burns forver

Netherrack burning forever makes it a useful decorative tool (Image via Mojang)

Netherrack is one of the most common blocks in the entire game. It's also not very useful, but it does have one hidden feature that makes it worth keeping around.

Netherrack will burn forever when set alight. This makes it an incredibly useful block for light when coal is in short supply or when needing fire for a build.

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8) Lightning can remove rust from copper

Lightning is a useful tool for resetting copper when it becomes too rusted (Image via Mojang)

One of the most interesting features of copper is its ability to change texture and oxidize over time. However, this also means that particular textures can be hard to find, as forgetting to check for even a short time can mean missing a particular stage.

Thankfully, one of the many uses of lightning, outside of afflicting many mobs, is removing oxidation from copper, resetting rust progress.

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7) Pathway blocks as windows

Pathway blocks make for useful day one windows (Image via Mojang)

Pathway blocks might seem like a strange choice for a window, but they're actually incredibly useful. They are almost the height of a full block, but a little shorter.

This allows players to see and even shoot arrows through to hurt Minecraft's most dangerous mobs safely. Those very same mobs won't be able to see the player attacking them.

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6) Mud into clay

Dripstone, found within the aptly named dripstone cave biome, has several niche but helpful hidden uses.

One of the more interesting of these uses is its ability to slowly covert mud blocks into clay blocks by allowing water to drip out of them. This gives players who enjoy building with bricks a renewable source of clay.

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5) Dripstone can be used to farm lava

A small dripstone lava farm (Image via Mojang)

Farming clay is not the only hidden use of dripstone. Placing lava above dripstone and positioning a cauldron below so that it can collect the lava drips will eventually cause it to fill.

Due to the average chance of a cauldron update happening per tick, it works out to roughly one bucket of lava per day per dripstone. This rate can eventually make even the hungriest Minecraft supersmelter run smoothly.

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4) Boats on ice

Ice spikes biomes are one of the best places to harvest huge amounts of ice (Image via Mojang)

Boats are one of the best ways to travel on land and in the water. This is due to a strange physics interaction between boats and ice that causes boats to move at incredible speeds.

This actually makes ice incredibly useful for Minecraft Nether bases since players can travel eight blocks per block at truly mind-numbing speeds.

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3) Wool blocks vibrations

Wool can make exploring ancient cities much safer (Image via Mojang)

Ancient cities are some of the best structures in Minecraft for players that enjoy a bit of risky exploration. Any accidents can result in the dangerous Warden being woken up to hunt players down.

Thankfully, wool has the hidden secondary use of being able to block and absorb vibrations, allowing much easier exploration of these structures.

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2) Magma blocks restore breath

Magma blocks might seem dangerous, but they actually make caving much safer (Image via Mojang)

Magma blocks might seem like nothing but a hindrance, pulling swimming players into the depths while also inflicting damage. However, being in a magma block's bubble column actually restores breath.

This makes them an incredible utility block when caving underwater, which is the best method for getting resources due to how flush with ore caves are since Minecraft's ore distribution changed.

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1) Growing large mushrooms can break nearly anything

Mushrooms are actually one of the game's most destructive forces (Image via Mojang)

Similar to how sapliings can grow into full trees, small mushrooms can turn into huge mushrooms. These are commonly found naturally generated within Minecraft's mushroom island biomes.

Mushrooms growing actually have enough force to break many normally indestructable blocks, including the end portal frames required to reach the end dimension.