Taking Inventory: Water Bottle

*Glug glug glug* Ahhh... After a hard day’s mining, with the stone dust getting into your mouth, and your throat sore from screaming every time you think you spot a skeleton, there’s nothing like kicking back with Minecraft’s most refreshing item – the water bottle.

Water bottles were added in version 1.0.0 of Minecraft, released in November 2011, at the same time as the potion brewing system. Which is no coincidence, because water bottles are a key first step for every potion in the game. In fact, that’s pretty much all they’re useful for, though they do make a nice sign for a potion shop if you put them in an item frame.

It’s easy to make a water bottle – just arrange three blocks of glass in a crafting grid to make a glass bottle, and then right-click on some water or a cauldron to fill it up. If you pick the latter, perhaps because you’re in the Nether and there’s no water around, filling a bottle will remove a third of the cauldron’s contents in one go. That seems like way more than should fit in the bottle – I guess the rest spills over the sides?

Your other option for getting a water bottle, if for some reason you really hate crafting (and if that’s the case then perhaps this isn’t the game for you), is to fish one up. With an unenchanted fishing rod, you’ve got a 1.2 percent chance of landing a bottle full of water, which is one in every 83-ish casts. Good luck!

Water bottles are pretty popular in the real world. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement – more than 480 *billion* plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the globe, up from about 300 billion a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the Sun – which is a very, very long way away. In space, no-one can hear you sip.

Once drunk, most of these bottles are thrown away, despite the plastic used to make them being very easy to recycle. Most end up in a landfill or in the ocean, where they’ll stay for centuries, possibly millennia. According to scientists who study plastic waste, by 2050 the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish.

So next time you finish a drink, keep hold of the plastic bottle and use it again. And again. And again. And then a few more times for good measure. And then recycle it properly so it can be made into lots more bottles for the future. Otherwise, in a few decades time, sentient plastic bottles will most likely take over the planet as the only remaining species. I, for one, welcome our plasticky overlords.