Taking Inventory: Glass Pane

Flat, clear, and fragile, the glass pane is a staple of any build project. At the most basic utilitarian level, glass panes allow you to see Creepers lurking outside your front door before you open it, but at their most beautiful they can enable huge impressive stained glass creations.

Glass panes first became a part of Minecraft in beta version 1.8, the Adventure Update, which also added melons, fence gates, and Endermen. They’ve been retextured a few times since, and at one point we accidentally made them totally opaque, but otherwise, they’ve been playing the same role since they were originally implemented.

What is that role, you ask? The answer is “making prettier and more efficient windows”. Glass blocks are great but, when it comes to prettiness, sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of variation in the depth of a building’s walls. Panes do that job nicely.

The efficiency is notable too. While six glass blocks make six windows on their own, they can also be turned into a whopping 16 glass panes. One or two crafts is usually plenty for a smaller house, and if you’re making something larger then you’ll especially appreciate the efficiency gains.

Which leaves one question. How do you get panes of glass? Well, as noted above you can craft them out of six blocks of glass. You can also harvest them from villages and woodland mansions in different colours. But WAIT! Before you swing your pickaxe at some poor villager’s window, remember that glass shatters. You’ll need a silk touch enchantment on that pick to collect the panes.

As I noted when I wrote about glass blocks a few years back, glass windows like the ones we have today didn't become common in ordinary homes until the early 17th century. Before that, windows were made with panes of flattened animal horn or thin paper. They’d let light in, but it was hard to see through them.

Today, there are panes of glass everywhere – they cover most office buildings from top to bottom, they cover our mobile phone and laptop screens, and we look into them every day to when we do our hair or put on our makeup. Some of us even have panes of glass on our roofs, covering solar panels that generate electricity or heat water for our homes.

Go to a window and count how many panes of glass you can see right now. Impressive, right? That’s thanks to the beauty and efficiency of the simple glass pane!