When it comes to playing Minecraft on survival mode, combat is an inevitability. No matter how careful players are, the day will come when they are set upon by the accursed undead, dastardly Illagers, or denizens of the deep. In most of these cases, a good sword is more than enough to keep things under control, but there will be times when players will be wishing that they had a good ranged weapon. The bow is capable of doing just as much damage as a sword from a distance, but the catch is that players will need to constantly craft ammunition in order to continue using it.
Crafting arrows in Minecraft is by no means hard, but one of the materials that players need for it can be a bit of a hassle to gather up. Even so, crafting a bunch of arrows is a worthwhile investment for would-be archers that want to be prepared for anything. Whether players are hunting Ghasts and Blazes in the Nether or taking on the Ender Dragon, a ranged option is always helpful.
RELATED: Minecraft: What Do Lightning Rods Do?
Crafting arrows only requires three items: a stick, a feather, and a flint. Obviously, stick can be obtained by breaking down wooden planks in the crafting table, and feathers are acquired by killing Chickens. Any archer worth their salt will have a pen full of chickens just for this purpose. The annoying part comes in when players find themselves running out of flint, namely because of the inconsistent way in which flint is mined.
Players have a 10% chance to receive a flint every time they break a block of gravel. Using the torch trick to break an entire stack of gravel will never yield flint, however, so players will need to do everything manually. While this is certainly a late game solution, one way to drastically speed up flint gathering is to enchant a shovel with Fortune 3. This will increase the odds of getting flint from breaking gravel from 10% all the way up to 100%. Finding gravel should be easy, but getting the flint out of it tends to be both time consuming and tedious.
In the crafting table, stack all three ingredients on top of one another. Start with the feather on the bottom and the stick in the middle, and then put the flint on top. Thankfully, this crafts four arrows instead of one, so players will only need 16 of each item in order to make an entire stack of arrows for their bow or crossbow.
Minecraft is available now on Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch. and Xbox One.