How to Make a Boat in Minecraft: A Step-by-Step Guide (2021)

Just like everything else in Minecraft, making a boat starts with collecting the right ingredients. The best part is that you will find all the required ingredients at spawn in almost any default world. Practically, all you need is wood that Minecraft generously provides. But you can’t use it as it is, so here’s what to do instead:

Materials You Need to Make a Boat in Minecraft

As we mentioned above, we will need wood blocks first. You can then convert the wood blocks into wood planks, and finally, we can build a boat in our Minecraft world. Not to forget, you will also require a crafting table to make it all happen. With that said, follow the step-by-step process below:

  1. First, get two wood blocks by punching a tree until it breaks. Usually, it’s assigned to the left click or action button in your game on PC. It won’t take more than 8 seconds to break the wooden block without any tools. Later, once you get an ax, you can do it even faster. You can move close to the fallen block to collect it.
  2. Now, by pressing “E” or your inventory button, you can see the wood blocks you just collected. Now, in the inventory box, place the wood block in the Crafting area. You can do it by clicking on the wood block and then clicking on an empty block anywhere in the Crafting area. Doing so will move the wood block into the Crafting area and give you 4 wood planks. Repeat this step twice to get 8 wood planks.
  3. We will need 5 wood planks to make our boat. But as you might have noticed, your inventory only let you craft with 4 blocks. What you need now is a crafting table. You can find out how to make a Crafting Table via our linked article. Though, a quick recipe would look like this:
    Now, make sure you have a Crafting Table and at least 5 wood planks in your inventory. You can always go back to punching trees if you are out of wood blocks or planks.

How to Make a Boat in Minecraft

Please note that you can use literally any tree in Minecraft to make your wooden planks. The tree species don’t impact the quality of your creations. With that out, let’s get started with building our boat.

  1. Start by placing the Crafting table on the ground. To do so, make sure it’s selected in your inventory slot. Then, right-click or use your action button while looking at the ground to place it. When your crafting table is selected, you will see a thick white border around its icon in your inventory.
  2. Once the crafting table is placed, right-clicking or using the action button on it will let you operate it. You will see a larger 3 x3 crafting area to function here and can now build your boat.
  3. Finally, you need to place the wood planks one by one in a u-shaped position. You can select the planks by left-clicking on them and placing them individually by right-clicking on empty blocks in the crafting area. The final result would look something like the screenshot below. And voila! Your newly crafted boat will appear on the right side of the crafting area. You can now select the boat and move it to an empty inventory slot.

How to Use a Boat to Travel in Minecraft

Congratulations, you have your boat ready and can set out on expeditions in your Minecraft world. Now that you know how to make a boat in Minecraft, it’s time to learn how to use it.

  1. Just like the crafting table, select the boat from your inventory and place it by right-clicking or using the action key. What you need to, however, make sure is that you place the boat in the water. Rivers and oceans are great places to test the boat.
  2. The color of your boat will change depending upon the wood you used while making it. After placing the boat in a water stream, you can enter it by right-clicking on it or using the action key on your PC.
    To row the boat, you can use the same keys you use to move your character. Furthermore, you can bring any livestock that’s following you into your boat using food or lead. There’s immense potential in Minecraft boats as you can collect them back by breaking them. Make sure to keep exploring.

Make Your Own Boat in Minecraft to Explore the World

So yeah, that’s pretty much it! You know what all elements you need and have the recipe as well. So you have everything to understand how to build a boat in Minecraft. If you are looking for more ideas and recipes to make, these Minecraft discord servers might be a good place to start. While you are getting into Minecraft, installing Optifine to improve performance and give your game an FPS boost might be a good idea. Now, go ahead and start exploring the vast Minecraft waters with your new boat. Don’t forget to share what you discover with us in the comments below.