Though not everyone likes water, boats are a crucial vehicle in Minecraft, hence you need to know how to create them. They let you traverse great distances over bodies of water, and there are a lot of those in randomly generated worlds. While riding horses and minecarts is fun, and using trident and Elytra is exhilarating, sometimes you need the old-fashioned rowing and nothing on the horizon but water. But to do any of that, as mentioned, you require a vessel, and ideally, have replacements in case it gets destroyed or lost. After all, getting stranded and having to swim to the shore is no fun. Thus, here’s how to make a boat in Minecraft.
1. Making a boat in Minecraft Survival Mode
Without hesitation, let’s dig into three steps required to craft and use a boat in Minecraft:
1. Materials needed to create a boat in Minecraft
Crafting a boat in Survival Mode for Minecraft requires you to have these materials:
- 5x Wood Plank
- 1x Wooden Shovel (On Bedrock and Educational Edition only)
The recipe is straightforward, especially since you can use any type of Wood Plank (Spruce, Dark Oak, Mangrove, Oak, Jungle, Birch, Crimson, Warped, Acacia). Also, you only require Wooden Shovel in specific cases since Java Edition only demands 5x Wood Plank. The former item can be obtained by chopping trees down, while the latter is crafted from 2x Stick and any type of Plank.
2. Steps for making boats in Minecraft
Now that you have the necessary items, you will need to follow the recipe for a boat in Minecraft:
- Start by crafting, placing, and using a Crafting Table.
- You will now see a 3 × 3 crafting grid, and will need to position the items you gathered in this order:
- First row. Place a Wood plank in the first rectangle. Leave the middle rectangle empty on Java Edition, and place Wooden Shovel on Bedrock Edition (Sometimes only in Pocket Edition). Put another Wood Plank in the third rectangle.
- Second row. Place a Wood Plank in each of the three rectangles.
- Third row. Leave the third row empty.
Minecraft doesn’t make the recipe exclusive to slots. Therefore, if the items remain in the same order, you can move the recipe one row down and still get a boat. To clarify, you can leave the first row empty, then put items from the first row into the second, and the second into the third.
- If you did everything right, a boat will appear in the singular slot on the right-hand side. You can now move it to the inventory or hotbar and use it identically to the Crafting Table. Unfortunately, boats are not stackable, so you cannot craft a lot of boats at once. Consequently, each boat will occupy one slot in your storage.
2. Add a boat to your inventory in Creative Mode
Another method of acquiring boats is simply dragging one from the repository of items in Minecraft Creative Mode. That is as easy as opening your inventory, selecting the compass icon in the top right corner, searching for “boat” and dragging it to your inventory. Alternatively, you can check the “Transportation”, “Tools”, “Items”, or “Redstone and Transportation” menus and find the boat there.
3. Use Minecraft commands to add a Minecraft boat
Another faster option if you’re an administrator or playing single-player is to turn on Minecraft cheats, and use the following commands:
- If you want to switch from Survival Mode to Creative Mode and use the procedure above:
/gamemode creative
- If you’re using Java Edition for Mac or PC and 1.13 to 1.19.1, you need this /give command to generate a boat:
/give @p boat 1
- For players on Java Edition 1.8 and later, and Bedrock Edition, the /give command for making boats is:
/give @p boat 1 0
You can also specify the type of boat, such as oak_boat, acacia_boat, birch_boat, and so on. Though we plan to cover this separately, you can also spawn a Birch Boat with Chest using commands with chest_boat as the base, e.g., oak_chest_boat.
Note. Contrary to what some players believe, you cannot buy a boat from a master-level fisherman villager. The opposite is true, as they offer to purchase a boat from you for one emerald. The sort of boat depends on the biome where the villager is. Luckily, boat names already suggest matching biomes.