Taking Inventory: Paper

Paper was added to the game, alongside sugarcane and bookshelves, early in Minecraft’s history – as part of the sixth Seecret Friday Update in July 2010. To make it, you’ll need sugarcane – put three into a crafting grid and you’ll get three sheets of paper out. You can also sometimes find paper in shipwrecks, strongholds, and chests belonging to village cartographers.

You can take those three sheets of paper and combine them with a piece of leather to get a book, or you can get eight pieces of paper and surround a compass with them to make a map. Add gunpowder to paper to get a firework rocket – the more gunpowder, the higher it’ll fly before exploding – and throw in a firework star if you want explosion effects.

Paper is also a good way to get hold of emeralds. If you find a librarian or a cartographer in a village, there’s a decent chance that they’ll be willing to trade 24 sheets of paper for an emerald. That sounds like a lot of paper, but if you get a sugarcane farm going then you’ll be sorted in no time.

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.