Top 10 things to treasure in Minecraft

Since Minecraft is a survival game, players will spend a lot of their time hunting for valuable resources to progress. Wood and stone tools are meant to be replaced by iron and diamonds, for example. However, given how many items are in the game, it can be hard to know what to keep around and what to trash.

Detailed below are the 10 items that players should never get rid of, as they are incredibly hard to get or needed in huge numbers.

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Minecraft's 10 most treasurable things

10) Leather

An enchanting area with a built-in XP farm (Image via Mojang)

Leather might seem like a strange inclusion on this list. It is often one of the first things a player might get if there are cows near spawn. However, despite this, it can be annoying to get in large numbers.

There is a several-minute cooldown on cow breeding, so getting the roughly four dozen or so pieces of leather needed to set up an enchanting area can take quite a long time. This means that players should hang on to any leather they can get.

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9) Gunpowder

Some of Minecraft's most impressive expert-level farms use TNT duplication to automatically harvest items, meaning gunpowder is a very useful item to have a lot of. Gunpowder can also be used to craft firework rockets, which allow players to fly through the air with elytra. This means some of the game's most iconic end-game content requires huge amounts of gunpowder.

TNT can also be used to make explosive Minecraft TNT launchers, so any players on the more destructive or chaotic side will especially want to collect gunpowder.

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8) Ender pearls

Ender pearls are needed to reach the End dimension (Image via Mojang)

Ender pearls are one of the most annoying items to collect. They are only sometimes dropped by endermen, which are already a difficult mob to find in large numbers in the Overworld. This makes getting enough ender pearls to activate the stronghold portal and reach Minecraft's ender dragon boss fight a long and tedious grind.

Thankfully, much of this grind can be avoided if players collect the pearls they get throughout the game rather than waiting to collect all the needed pearls right before the dragon fight.

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7) XP farms

A basic endermen XP farm (Image via Mojang)

An efficient Minecraft XP farm is one of the best things a player can invest in. XP farms dramatically reduce the time required to hit level 30 and gain access to Minecraft's best enchantments, such as mending, riptide, silk touch, and fortune. Gathering XP by other means feels quick until you're trying to gain those last three levels to finish a fully enchanted pickaxe.

XP Farms also makes mending a much better enchantment. For example, setting up a basic endermen farm after killing the dragon will allow players to almost instantly return any gear to full durability, rather than slowly hunting mobs in the wild to do the same.

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6) Emeralds

Emeralds blocks can be used to run the powerful beacon block (Image via Mojang)

Villager trading might be the most powerful thing players have access to. Players can spend emeralds on furnace fuel, enchanted tools, weapons, and armor, and even maps to hard-to-find structures such as Minecraft's elusive woodland mansion.

The only reason emeralds are so low on this list is because once a trading hall is established, they tend to flow in quite quickly. They are still an incredibly useful item, though.

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5) Diamonds

Diamond ore next to lava is a classic sight (Image via Mojang)

It might be surprising to see diamonds so low on a list of Minecraft treasures. They are incredibly useful, after all. The best weapons and armor found in the Overworld are made of diamonds, and they are an icon of the game.

However, thanks to the powerful Minecraft fortune enchantment, diamonds become abundant in the late game, especially once the player gets netherite gear. Diamonds are much more valuable on multiplayer servers, acting as de facto currency for many players.

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4) Iron

A completed iron farm (Image via Mojang)

Iron tools and weapons might quickly get outclassed by diamond and netherite, but iron reigns supreme on the technical side of things. Due to items like hoppers and anvils requiring huge amounts of iron, players will need a lot of it. Many of the game's best farms use stacks and stacks of iron to move items around.

Iron is also useful for shields, one of the best ways to stay alive in harder difficulties, such as hardcore, which was recently announced for Minecraft Bedrock.

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3) Lava

Lava tends to get a bad rap. Players often only really mess with lava when they fall into it, causing all of their hard-earned items to be incinerated. It is, in actuality, an incredibly useful item. Lava is used in many automated farms, such as iron farms, as the main method of killing mobs. Additionally, it is the best fuel source in the game, able to smelt 100 items in a single bucket's worth.

Thankfully, with the inclusion of dripstone, lava is now a renewable resource. A lava source block can be placed on top of the dripstone. This will cause lava to slowly drip into the block below. Place a cauldron there, and occasionally, it will refill, allowing for a new bucket of lava to be collected.

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2) Redstone

Redstone makes this list for very similar reasons to iron. Many of the game's best farms will use entire shulker boxes worth of stuff. Not only is redstone dust required in huge numbers, but builds such as sorting systems and Minecraft super smelters tend to also use large quantities of full redstone blocks and other components.

Thankfully, cleric villagers can sell redstone in acceptable amounts. It can also be dropped by witches, which are farmable, though witch farms are infamous for being behemoths to build.

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1) Villagers

Villagers are the single most important mob to keep safe in a survival world. They are also incredibly frustrating due to their inability to be led with seeds or a lead. As mentioned earlier on, trading is one of the most powerful things players have access to, and villagers make that possible.

What makes the trading system especially useful is that players can cure zombie villagers to get huge discounts on items, and breaking and replacing workstations can reset trade options. Once a proper Minecraft villager trading hall is set up, the game plays almost entirely differently due to the resources players have access to.

Additionally, villagers are used to farm iron due to their ability to spawn iron golems. This can be done entirely automatically, making them even more important.