The Making of the Minecraft Item List

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This post is about my experience making an interactive list of every item in Minecraft. You can see it here.

Minecraft Item List

Every time I start a new Minecraft world, I get the urge to try and collect one of every single block and item in the game. It’s an overwhelming endeavor; new versions of the game have well over 1400 unique items and blocks.

For my most recent playthrough, I wanted to make a checklist. However, I was disappointed by the incompleteness of the lists I found online. The best one I found omitted unobtainable blocks like Bedrock and Farmland, but I wanted a list with ALL the items, even the weird ones that can’t be obtained by normal means.

So I made one! It has some nice features too, you can select a version of Minecraft and generate a list of the items that were present in that version. You can also sort the list alphabetically, by name length, or by age (how long since it was first added to the game).

One of my favorite features is the ability to select multiple sortings and set some as tiebreakers for others using the priority field.

For example, if you want a list of items sorted first by name length where ties are broken alphabetically, select both “Alphabetical” and “Name Length” sorts, set the priority of “Name Length” to 1 and “Alphabetical” to 2. Lower priorities come first.

Anyway, check it out! I worked hard on it and hope someone finds it useful.

How it was Made

Creating the list was a multi-step process, but it came down to two huge steps:

  1. Scrape minecraft.wiki for info on every block and item (Python)
  2. Create a webpage that takes the data and turns it into an interactive list (PHP, SQL, and JS)

Web Scraping with Python

In Python, I made use of the Beautiful Soup library which has useful tools for navigating the html of a webpage. Basically, I wrote a script which navigates to a page on the wiki which stores a list of all the blocks in the game with links to their own dedicated pages (here). Then, it goes through each item one by one, saving lots of information including the item name, and what versions the item was added and removed in.

It does all this by finding the correct html elements which hold information. These elements can be deeply nested. I started by finding an element with an ID I could use as a starting point. Then, I navigated the tree from the found element until I get to where I needed. For example, I did:

blocksDiv = soup.find(id="List_of_blocks").parent.find_next_sibling('div')

which navigates to an element with an ID of “List_of_blocks”, goes to its parent, then finds the next <div> tag which contains a list of blocks. After this I loop through the child <li> elements to get info on each block in that list which involves more html navigation.

BeautifulSoup has a way to nicely print the source html of a page which made it easier to read. I used this to figure out what path I needed to take to get to the needed information.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of items which didn’t have their own pages, so I had to gather their data manually. The biggest example of this was finding the version added for all of the items made from wood types.

For example,

  • Dark Oak was added in Java Edition 1.7.2
  • Plank variants were added in Java Edition 1.2.4
  • Button variants weren’t added until Java Edition 1.13

So, ‘Dark Oak Planks’ was added in 1.7.2 while ‘Dark Oak Button’ wasn’t added until 1.13.

There are currently 11 types of wood and 17 blocks made from wood which I needed to find this answer for because none of these 187 blocks have their own dedicated page. By finding the versions each block made from wood and wood type were added, I was able to complete this task more quickly.

List Creation with PHP, SQL, and JS

Once all the information was exported to csv files, I was able to start on the actual webpage.

I created a WordPress plugin which converts the csv files into databases when installed. This gave me all the powers (and annoyances) of SQL and wpdb when generating the list.

There are 3 generated tables:

  • Blocks
    • Name
    • Version Added ID
    • Version Removed ID
  • Items
    • Name
    • Version Added ID
    • Version Removed ID
  • Versions
    • Name
    • Value

The ‘Value’ field in the Versions table represents the order in which the versions came out. A newer version always has a higher value than an older one. This is used to sort the list by age and to figure out what items where present in a specific version.

Printing out the list wasn’t all too difficult. What was difficult was implementing all of the user choices.

In order to let the user do things like “show only the items that were in a specific version of the game” or “sort by name length ascending”, my script converts all of your choices into one big burly SQL expression. This step is not trivial! Especially because different choices require a different number of joins between tables in the database.

In the end, I made great use of the WITH operator to create tables to be used in later steps of the query.

One interesting case is generating a list of items in a specific version of the game. This means I have to only include:

  1. Items first added before or in this version
  2. and Items removed after this version or never removed

So, I defined two tables addedItems (those added in or before this version) and notRemovedItems (those removed after this version or never removed). Then, I NATURAL JOIN them to find the items in both lists (natural join works the same as an intersection when each table has only items that are not null and have the exact same fields).

To cap off this section, here is an example of one of the giant sql statements my code generates. This one gets all the blocks that were in the version with a value of 100 and sorts them alphabetically.

WITH neededItems AS (SELECT name, versionAddedID, versionRemovedID FROM {Blocks} UNION SELECT name, versionAddedID, versionRemovedID FROM {Items}), 

addedItems AS (SELECT neededItems.name, neededItems.versionAddedID FROM neededItems LEFT JOIN {Versions} ON neededItems.versionAddedID={Versions}.id WHERE ({Versions}.value<=100) OR (neededItems.versionAddedID IS NULL)), 

notRemovedItems AS (SELECT neededItems.name, neededItems.versionAddedID FROM neededItems LEFT JOIN {Versions} ON neededItems.versionRemovedID={Versions}.id WHERE ({Versions}.value>100) OR (neededItems.versionRemovedID IS NULL)) 

SELECT name FROM (addedItems NATURAL JOIN notRemovedItems) ORDER BY name ASC;

What Even is an Item?

To be clear, this list is NOT perfect. The version history for each block on the wiki is not completely standardized so I’m sure the ‘version added’ my Python script found is not correct for every item. Also, there is human error for the items that I had to find information for manually.

But a more interesting inaccuracy comes with the question “What is an item?”

It’s not an easy question to answer, the way items and blocks have been implemented in Minecraft has changed a lot between versions. As recently as Java Edition 1.13, an event called “The Flattening” completely changed how items are represented in code.

The farther back you go in the version history of Minecraft, the weirder things get…

Way back in Java Edition Indev 0.31, items were just sprites stored in one big png titled “items.png”. Most of the items in this png at this time were unobtainable by any means at all. So do the items added in this png count?

How about this,

  1. the texture for Iron Chestplate was added even farther back in Java Edition Classic 0.24_SURVIVAL_TEST
  2. This texture was removed in Java Edition Indev 0.31
  3. The item sprite was added to items.png in Java Edition Indev 0.31
  4. Finally, the model for Iron Chestplate was added again in Java Edition Indev 20100218 and can be worn

I’ve actually simplified a bit here, but given this information, when would you say Iron Chestplates were added? You can easily argue for any of these three versions. In the end, I decided on Indev 0.31 when it was added to the items.png.

Possible Changes In the Future

As with all projects anyone has ever completed ever, I have lots of ideas that did not make their way into the final product. The most crucial would be a way to filter out unobtainable items like Bedrock or Command blocks, or weird items like Infested Cobblestone. There was no easy way to gather this information from the wiki pages programmatically, so this would have been a long manual endeavor.

There’s also other improvements I want to make to the UI, so if there’s a lot of interest (from me or from others), I’ll come back to this project occasionally.

Fun Things I Found

Petrified Oak Slab

There’s this weird item that is unobtainable even through the creative menu, but is still in the game. The Petrified Oak Slab seems to be a compatibility item with old versions of Minecraft.

Originally, there was only one type of Wooden Slab, and it was immune to fire and had to be broken with a pickaxe. They changed this in a later version, obviously. However, if you take a world from before Java Edition 1.3.1 and open it with a later version, any placed Wooden Slabs will become Petrified Oak Slabs and still have their fire immunity properties!

Kind of makes you wish there were a way to officially make petrified wood items that are immune to fire.

The Original 3 Items

The first version of Minecraft is “Cave Game Tech Test” and is extremely bare bones. Only 3 blocks trace back all the way to this first version. They are:

  • Stone
  • Grass Block
  • Air

Now, air is kind of silly. Air really is a block in the game ever since Java Edition 1.7.2, making it one of the most common blocks I guess, but in this version it is simply the lack of a block, so was it really added in this version? Makes you think.

Longest Item Names

When copper was being added in 1.17, there were some memes over the long item names that now existed. The longest being “Waxed Lightly Weathered Cut Copper Stairs.” “Lightly Weathered” was later replaced with “Exposed” meaning the longest copper block name became “Waxed Weathered Cut Copper Stairs” which comes in at 33 characters!

However, there are 2 items with longer names! It’s easy enough to find them with my list generator, but they are:

  • Cracked Polished Blackstone Bricks
  • Polished Blackstone Pressure Plate

With 34 characters each.

Happy Collecting!

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed reading about how I made the list and I hope you find the list useful.

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