Block of the Week: Magma

Magma is a good block to keep a decent supply of for several handy reasons. The first is that it emits a small amount of light, making it a good choice for mood lighting in the darker corners of your home. The second is that a fire lit on top of a magma block with a flint and steel will burn indefinitely, just like netherrack. No short-lived log fireplaces any more!

The third, and perhaps most useful, is that magma blocks will deal one damage every half-second to any living entities standing on top of them, but won't destroy items. By shoving mobs into a pit lined with magma, you can easily kill them off in large numbers. Be careful collecting the drops, though - to avoid hurting yourself you'll need to sneak, use a potion of fire resistance or wear a pair of boots with the Frost Walker enchantment.

Best of all, you can conceal a magma block underneath any thin block - like a layer of snow, carpet, redstone repeater or comparator - and it'll still do full damage to anyone that walks on top. No-one will ever know that your beautiful hallway is actually a death trap!

Some people claim that that if you dig straight downward from Europe or America, you'll end up in Australia. That's not true, and we don't recommend trying - because way before you get there, you'll dig into the real-life magma that lies at the centre of our planet and burn to a crisp. Cool! Actually, the complete opposite of cool, we guess.

The magma under our feet, which occasionally pulses to the surface in the form of volcanoes, is a thick and extremely hot mixture of molten and solid rock. Many billions of years ago the whole surface of the Earth was made of magma - but the outermost layer hardened when exposed to the coldness of space, forming a crust that we live on today. In fact, it's pretty amazing that we've able to live here at all - go upward or downward a couple of kilometres, and it's impossible for humans to survive.

Magma planet photo by the European Southern Observatory