Tutorial:Craftmine

This tutorial explains the basic premise of the 2025 April Fool's Day joke snapshot The Craftmine Update (referred to in this tutorial as Craftmine), as well as various hints and tips on how to play efficiently.

Gameplay

Craftmine changed the way Minecraft was played into that of an RPG or a roguelike – players create levels, or "mines", with both pre-defined and player-chosen characteristics called "mine ingredients" which change how that mine is played. Players accumulate items they find in the mine to rack up experience points, which can be exchanged for unlocks in multiple skill trees which can either help or hinder them in future mines. These experience points are only awarded to players if they can successfully reach a mine exit – if they die, the mine is marked as lost and XP cannot be gained.

Every fifth mine players enter is a special mine – these mines cannot be altered with other mine ingredients, and have a designated objective that has to be achieved to win the mine. Once won, special mines award players with a shimmering key, which can be used to unlock various rooms in the hub.

While in the mines

Early preparation

Your first few mines are crucial in setting up a fluid routine early into your run. Though you might just be looking to rush in and grab anything you find in this stage, there's a few things you're going to want to grab to help out later:

A boat: crafting and riding a boat will grant you access to the Icy Surfaces challenge mine ingredient in future mines, which is an easy way to double your XP output with minimal difficulty increase, as well as for faster travel in general when using boats.
- Don't forget that you have a crafter with you at your mine entrance, so you do not have to wait longer than the first mine to acquire this ingredient!
A firefly bush: while also having a great XP value for its abundance (see § Finding acceptable item value for more), it also grants you access to the Swamp Biomes mine ingredient, where you will be able to collect much more of these, as well as some of our next must-get:
Frogs: killing a frog will grant you access to the Wednesday Frogs challenge mine ingredient, which is a handy 1.2× multiplier for if you can see a mine base has no biomes where frogs can generate.

Mine ingredient choices

As stated in the previous section, various challenge mine ingredients aren't much of challenges at all, and more of just an easier method of increasing your XP output per mine – though not all are worth using in every mine, so look at the mine base to judge if certain challenges are worth risking (e.g. the Eternal Night challenge might be too risky to use if hostile mobs are part of the mine base).

Terrain modifications can also override what is on the mine base – for example, if floating islands are coming next mine but they might be a pain to deal with at this moment in time, you can always use the Surface World ingredient to override it.

Finding acceptable item value

While some items may have higher XP values per unit than others, most of them aren't all worth attempting to grab a hold of, either because they're too time-consuming to collect en-masse or they're not available in most mines you attempt to visit.

Note that slabs often give more experience than their base variants.

The following is a short list of items which are worth seeking out due to ease-of-access:


XP Value	Items	Notes
1.8	Block of Copper	Copper is a very common ore which drops in abundance, meaning blocks of copper are easy to acquire given sufficient smelting fuel.
0.6	Ender Pearl	In certain situations, endermen may be farmed.
0.45	Block of Coal	Compacting your coal into blocks greatly inflates their XP value, and due to their long burn time synergise well with obtaining blocks of copper.
0.2	Bone Block	Depending on whether skeletons spawn in your mine, you can harvest bones from them and create bone blocks to compress the worth of bone meal. This also synergises well with firefly bushes as you can convert back to bone meal and easily gain 0.8 more XP via duplication.
0.12	Magma Block	Magma blocks generate in oceans rather frequently as aquifiers, and when Nether biomes are enabled they're even more frequent.
0.1	Firefly Bush	Firefly bushes are very easy to find on river banks, as well as being numerous in swamp biomes. They can also be duplicated via bone meal.
0.07	Chiseled Nether Bricks	In mines where you can obtain Nether bricks, chiselling them is a quick method to slightly inflate their worth.

How long to stay

Choosing how long to stay in each mine is an important choice - the key factor is the balance between the risk of death and the reward of getting more experience.Beds do not function in this version, and a single death renders all previous experience and items gained in the mine useless. Structures are mostly absent - exploration beyond a few hundred blocks or so purely for loot-seeking purposes is not advised, and it is best to select a home base near a mine exit. If inventory size is small, mining for the base world material only is a good strategy - in other situations, other options may work.

Preparing for more mines

Player unlocks

As you play through more and more mines, your XP bar is going to get rather full. These can be spent on player unlocks to make future mines easier (or harder) for you to play. The following are recommendations on what to get and what to avoid getting until the end (assuming you are after the advancements in the Unlocks tab), on a category basis.

Exploration

"+1 jump" does not increase your jump height, but rather increases the number of jumps you get in mid-air. Picking up even one of these makes clutching a fall really easy, and the more you can acquire, the better.
"Learning" is a must-pick – it makes accumulating XP much easier, meaning you can unlock higher-level unlocks way faster.
"Need for speed", "Amphibian", and "Swift sneaking" are all good quality-of-run unlocks which will make movement feel more fluid.
"MEGA JUMP" is a hindrance for navigating terrain – even with "Safe Falling", you still take fall damage, it's just minimised.
"Pathfinder" is useful for if you actually use eyes of exit to locate mine exits, however so long as you use the Surface Exits mine ingredient, you should locate them pretty easily.
"Wing Guardian Leaf In Ocean" is rather useless, but can have some niche use cases for if you actually have to fly for whatever reason.

Crafting

"Inventory crafting" and what stems off of it are non-negotiable – you must get these.
"Pockets" and what stems off of it are also non-negotiable – in order to score highly, you need a full inventory.
"Heart of gold" and "Heart of Netherite?" don't increase the experience you get from smelting, they increase the value of ingots and netherite scrap you smelt. They're still worth picking, though.

Gatherer

"Collector" is nifty for catching any items which fall off of cliffsides, or for items popped off onto the ground via natural causes.
"You Are the Campfire" is an unlock just to get in your way – you can't extinguish the fires you place, and any raw food will just cook and be dropped.
It is possible to obtain both the "Silky pick" and "Lucky pick" unlocks concurrently – however, because the silky pick is a golden pickaxe and has the lowest mining tier, your XP is better spent buying the lucky pick.
"Rare Earth Specialist" can be okay for on the offchance you encounter rare earth minerals like diamonds or lapis, but again, it's rare to come across these.

Combat

"Spellbook" is good to grab for if you're after the advancements in the Unlocks tab, but outside of it has barely any use as the unlocks it enables for you are mostly useless.
"Armaments" isn't needed to actually equip armour, as it can just be equipped by using it in the main hand – but it does open the pathway for being automatically given armour.
"Doctors order" and what stems off of it can take your mind off of hunting for food for the first few days of your mine.
"Shield Bash" is a double-edged sword – while it gives shields a good defensive stun ability, it does remove its natural blocking feature.
- It does open the road for "The Natural Evolution of a Shield" though, making a mace more accessible, and also gelling well with multiple mid-air jumps.
"Viking" and what stems off of it grants you both a pwerful weapon and a boat to ride, which synergises well with the Icy Surfaces challenge.

Pets

Every other pet other than the pet wolf is cosmetic, they have no function other than following you around.

The pet wolf, however, functions similarly to how an actual wolf in Minecraft does, with the exception of carrying a netherite sword with the "Descendant of Sif" unlock.

School of Hard Knocks

Every unlock in this tree is designed to hinder you, so unless you're seeking to get the An Exercise in Futility advancement, do not unlock anything from here.