Block of the Month: Block of Iron

There are several reasons why you might want a block of iron. The first is for crafting – blocks of iron are needed in the recipe for making an anvil, and they’re used to build iron golems. They can also be used to power a beacon – you’ll need at least nine of them, arranged in a 3x3 square.

The second reason is for the storage of large amounts of iron ingots. By crafting your ingots into blocks, you can store nine times as many in the same chest space, and they’re easy to convert back. If your inventory is full on a mining trip, consider smelting up what you’ve found and then converting it to blocks to save some space.

Iron blocks have their own unique aesthetic qualities. They’re great for sci-fi-themed builds, or industrial applications, where clean metal surfaces elevate the atmosphere, making every redstone contraption look like it belongs in a modern tech lab. 

Finally, you can put a block of iron under a note block to get the “iron xylophone” sound. Though a xylophone is made of wood, and a metal one is more usually called a “vibraphone” or “glockenspiel”. I have written a strongly-worded letter to the developers on the subject.

Outside of Minecraft, on the planet called Earth, iron is a chemical element that sits near the top of the periodic table, nestled between manganese and cobalt. By weight, it’s the most common element on our planet – juuuust ahead of oxygen – mostly because it’s the material that makes up almost all of the Earth’s inner and outer cores.

On the surface, where we humans live, it’s a little rarer. There’s less iron in the Earth’s crust than there is silicon, aluminum, or oxygen. But that hasn’t stopped it from becoming one of the most important metals on the planet. Humans figured out how to smelt it from iron ore a little over 3,000 years ago, marking the dawn of the Iron Age, and today it’s the cheapest metal you can buy.

As well as its importance to human civilization, iron is also very important to our health. The body of an adult human contains about four grams of iron, where it’s used to transport oxygen in our blood and store it in our muscles. That makes it an important dietary nutrient, which is found in leafy vegetables, tofu, beans, fish, and poultry. It’s also sometimes added to bread and breakfast cereals.

Right now, Mojang Studios' top nutritionists don’t recommend eating iron blocks. But you never know what that advice might change – so it’s probably best to stockpile some in your chests. Just in case.