Minecraft Crafting Table with Items (for a Scavenger Hunt)

Minecraft Crafting Table with Items (for a Scavenger Hunt)

This is a Minecraft crafting table that I made for my son's birthday scavenger hunt. It comes with a few items that the kids had to find or craft and that can be placed in the slots of the crafting table.

Print efficiency

Both the crafting table and items are designed to be printable with a four color AMS and as few color changes as possible. The crafting table itself only requires two filament changes, so if you do not have an AMS, introduce pauses where the layers change color and you can easily swap filaments manually.

For the items, the number of filaments and color changes vary. Most items are designed to have very few changes except for the top and bottom layers. However, the iron ore is an exception with a lot of filament changes, because I did not see an alternative here.

Filaments

Most colors should be self-explanatory and are basic PLA in different colors. The following exceptions might be of interest:

• I printed the sand in cream PETG HF, because I had it on hand and the color was a great match for the sand block

• I printed iron parts with Overture Silk PLA in silver. However, if you have something darker (more iron-like) on hand, it might be a better fit, because I personally find that filament a bit too light and bluish for iron.

• The light wood tone of the crafting table, the planks and the inner part of the log were printed with Overture Matte PLA in light brown - in my eyes that's a perfect fit

The scavenger hunt

Now, if you are planning a Minecraft-themed scavenger hunt, this might be interesting. Obviously, you might not be able to reproduce everything and of course it depends on the children's age and Minecraft familiarity, if this is suitable or not. But you might find some inspiration here...

1. The motivation and recipes

At the beginning I tell my son and his guests that there is a chest in the basement that they can loot. But the problem is that it is too dark down there, so we need to craft a lantern. I ask the kids if they know the recipe to craft a lantern. The great thing about crafting recipes in Minecraft is that they are rather visual. If the kids have no clue how to craft a lantern, one can simply ask what goes in the middle and what should be outside to get there. For the lantern they need iron nuggets and a torch.

I have prepared cards with crafting recipes or simple reminders of where items could be obtained. With those I work backwards with the kids to basically get two crafting chains, one for the iron nuggets and one for the torch (check out the images, there is also one with these recipe chains):

For the torch, the kids need to obtain coal and wood logs. The logs can be crafted into planks, which can be crafted into sticks, which combined with the coal give them torches.

For the iron nuggets, the kids need to defeat creepers to get gunpowder, obtain sand, craft TNT from gunpowder and sand, use the TNT to mine iron ore, smelt the iron ore into iron ingots and then they can craft iron nuggets from the ingots.

Yeah, quite a list. That's why I am using cards to visualize that.

2. The scavenger hunt

At this point the kids have four items to find: Sand, coal, wood and gunpowder.

These are hidden along a nice walk around our neighborhood at suitable places. Sand on a playground with sand, wood at a tree and coal, well, at some point along the path, because I did not have a logical place for that.

The gunpowder needs to be obtained by defeating creepers. For that I printed creeper maze giftboxes by Almenning. The gunpowder items fit in there perfectly, but the kids might need some help to figure out how to open these boxes.

3. Crafting

After a nice walk and some searching, everyone comes back with the required items. Then it is time to follow through the recipes.

I am using an old project of mine, an LED cube that I reprogrammed to show the items that the kids have crafted. Please do not attempt to build that LED cube unless you have some experience with Linux and coding, because that project is now six years old and you will run into incompatibilities with modern software packages. I literally took that old project with its old software and added some scripts to control it with Minecraft items, but I would not want to set it up fresh now. Obviously, you could just hand the crafted items to the kids :)

So, they place the items on the crafting table according to the recipes to get more and more crafted items until they can craft the lantern. On the way there are only two unusual steps:

• From iron ore to iron ingot is a smelting step. For that I printed the Minecraft Furnace by Moss 3D.

• Obtaining iron ore with TNT is a bit obscure and honestly mostly there, so I can have a special effect: I place the ore cube on top of the LED cube from the beginning. When the kids craft the TNT, I show it on the LED cube and play the explosion sequence from Minecraft on it - along with the sound from a hidden Bluetooth speaker.

4. The finale

When the kids finally craft the lantern, I hand out lanterns for every kid. These are, of course, also 3D printed with an LED tealight in them: Minecraft lantern - tealight by izboxo (with the solid bottom).

Equipped with those, we head into the basement where I did my best to create a cave atmosphere with dim lights and where they find the chest. (The chest is a small sitting bench that can be opened for storage and I placed cardboard around the outside to make it look like a Minecraft chest.)