Best ways to move items in Minecraft

Minecraft continues to add a large selection of items to the game. It's only natural for players to end up filling up their inventories and storage blocks. Sometimes, fans need to move their commodities to a new location. This can be a tricky proposition depending on the volume of blocks/items being moved. Fortunately, there are more than a few solutions to address the issue.

Thanks to the implementations made over several Minecraft updates, players have a ton of options to move a large number of items or blocks without needing to spend too much time or too many resources to do so.

If readers are looking for some of the best available options, there are more than a few to consider.

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Ender chest network and other great ways to move items and blocks in Minecraft

Shulker boxes

Shulker boxes have a unique capability that sets them above many storage blocks (Image via Mojang)

One of the downsides of ordinary chests in Minecraft is that when they're broken, any contents within are dropped on the ground. Fortunately, shulker boxes don't have this problem in the slightest.

Shulker boxes have a total of 27 inventory slots and one particular upside: When broken, they keep their contents inside.

With this knowledge, players can fill a shulker box, break it, pick it up, and carry it wherever they need to without losing excess items or blocks.

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Ender chest network

Ender chests' interconnectivity makes them invaluable as a transport mechanism (Image via Defora/Reddit)

If Minecraft fans have leftover obsidian blocks and ender pearls, it would be a shame not to make a few ender chests, as they're one of the greatest ways to transport items over long distances. This is because ender chests are interconnected, so players can create multiple chests and access whatever is placed within them anywhere they'd like.

Granted, because ender chests are bound to a player, fans won't be able to place multiple empty chests to pull from. Once an ender chest is filled, any subsequent chests that are placed will contain the same inventory. Still, it's hard to beat being able to access a chest inventory across massive distances.

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Chest boats

Chest boats aren't only useful over the surface of the water in Minecraft (Image via Phoenix SC/YouTube)

A creation of The Wild Update/Minecraft 1.19, chest boats are cheap to produce and are more useful at transporting items and blocks than players might think. Although they do a great job at moving items across oceans or other bodies of water, they can also be moved quite quickly over land.

If players use ice/blue ice blocks and create a path from one place to another, a chest boat can move incredibly fast over them. These ice highways are a great means of moving items and blocks now that chests can be securely placed in a boat.

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Water channels

Water can be a solid option when moving items across various distances (Image via LordMC/YouTube)

By daisy-chaining water flows together in a channel in Minecraft, players can use the natural pushing power of water to move items along in a conveyor belt-like fashion. Once the items/blocks get to the end of the water trench, they can be dropped in a hopper and then a chest. Players can even create two-way water channels to move items in different directions between locations.

Water isn't always the fastest means of moving commodities in Minecraft, but it's incredibly reliable once players have implemented the necessary structure and water flows.

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Hopper lines

Interconnected hoppers can shuttle items and blocks along quite quickly (Image via Mojang)

Though this option is somewhat pricier due to the requirement of five iron ingots per hopper, it can be an incredibly effective measure for transporting goods in Minecraft. By connecting multiple hoppers together and extending them to a new location, players can move roughly 2.5 items per second to whatever location they choose.

This method may not be the most cost-effective or quick method for moving items and blocks. However, it won't let players down and takes almost no foreknowledge to set up and activate.