The reason you need sugarcane to make paper refers to papyrus – a material used to write on by the people of Ancient Egypt, almost six thousand years ago. Papyrus was made by weaving together strips of the papyrus plant, which grows in wetland areas all around the Mediterranean. Papyrus is still used today in some cultures to make baskets, hats, and floor mats.
The type of paper that we tend to use today, though, was invented about two thousand years ago in China – and is made from wood pulp. It was largely made by hand until paper mills were developed in Baghdad around 800AD, though this technology didn’t arrive in Europe for another five hundred years. Even when it did, paper was still very expensive – especially in book-sized quantities.
It wasn’t until the invention of steam-driven paper-making machines in the 19th century that paper began to get cheap enough for anyone to use it. Today, it’s made on enormous machines, some with reels 10 meters wide, that produce two kilometers of paper every minute. You’ll find it everywhere – it’s used in books, it’s used to cover walls in houses, it’s used in packaging, it’s used to make banknotes. It’s so cheap that we even use it to wipe our bottoms when we go to the toilet.
In Minecraft, though, paper-making is still a very manual process. So look after your paper, and it’ll look after you.
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