Taking Inventory: Sugar

Sugar was added to Minecraft because cake was added to Minecraft. In Beta version 1.2, which was released in early 2011, we added loads of good stuff to the game – note blocks, charcoal, squid, bonemeal, and yes – cake. But cake without sugar doesn’t taste very good, so we had to add sugar too.

There are two ways to get your hands on it. You can either kill witches, which have a chance of dropping it on death, or you can craft it from sugarcane or honey. Once acquired it can be turned into cake, pumpkin pie, or fermented spider eyes. Or, of course, you can use it to brew mundane potions or potions of swiftness. Oh, and horses love sugar – it’ll heal them, speed the growth of lil foals, and increase taming probability.

In the real world, there are lots of different kinds of sugars. There are simple ones, like glucose and fructose. But there are also more complex sugars made out of several of the simple ones stuck together, like lactose, maltose, and sucrose. Of all the sugars, lactose is the only one that can’t be extracted from plants – it can only be found in the milk of some mammals.

Humans eat too much sugar – an average of about 24 kg per year, with people in North and South America consuming an annual average of more than twice that. It’s tasty stuff, but eating too much of it leads to obesity, diabetes, heart attack, and tooth decay. So hold yourself back if you can – the World Health Organisation says that sugar should only make up about 5% of the total diet of adults and children.

Luckily, the calories you consume in Minecraft are exempt from that recommendation, so go wild! Grow yourself a whole plantation of sugarcane, harvest it all, and cake it up every day for a week! A month! A year! Just don’t come crying to us when your in-game teeth fall out.