Do the planks for a chest have to be the same wood type?

No. Any planks in any combination work, and the finished chest always looks identical. Two logs' worth of planks — eight in total — is all the recipe costs.

How many items can a double chest hold in Minecraft?

A double chest has 54 slots, and with a full stack of 64 in each it holds 3,456 items. A single chest has 27 slots and holds up to 1,728.

Can you put a chest on a llama or donkey?

Yes. Right-click a tamed donkey, mule or llama with a chest to equip it, and the animal gains extra inventory slots. Llamas can form caravans, making them excellent mobile storage for long expeditions.

Can a chest burn in lava or fire?

No — chests are fire and lava proof, and neither harms the contents. Explosions are the exception: a creeper or TNT blast will destroy a chest, so protect storage rooms accordingly.

How to Make a Chest in Minecraft

Your inventory holds 36 slots. Your ambitions hold considerably more. The chest is the first thing most players build after a crafting table, and it stays relevant forever: behind every storage hall, shulker loader and llama caravan is the same humble box of eight planks.

How to Craft a Chest

Gather eight wooden planks. Any wood works — oak, spruce, bamboo — and the planks do not even need to match each other. One log gives four planks, so two logs are the entire material cost.
Open a crafting table and fill every slot except the center with planks.
Take your chest. It looks the same no matter which wood you used.

Chests also turn up all over the world as loot containers — in dungeons, strongholds, villages, jungle and desert temples, Nether fortresses, end cities, igloos, woodland mansions, shipwrecks, ocean ruins, pillager outposts, bastions, ruined portals and ancient cities. Any chest you find can be broken and taken home; just note that breaking a full chest spills its contents on the ground rather than keeping them inside.

Single Chests and Double Chests

A lone chest has 27 slots, each holding a full stack — up to 1,728 items. Place a second chest directly beside it and the two merge into a large (double) chest with 54 slots and room for 3,456 items. There is no separate recipe for the double chest; placement does it automatically. The merge only works in pairs, so plan storage walls in doubles. One placement quirk: a chest cannot open if a solid block sits directly on top of it, so leave air (or a slab, stair or other non-solid block) above chests in a stacked wall.

More Than a Box: What Chests Are Used For

Crafting ingredient: chests are required to make hoppers, trapped chests, minecarts with chest, boats with chest and shulker boxes
Portable storage: put a chest on a tamed donkey, mule or llama and it becomes inventory space that walks with you; a llama caravan is a moving warehouse
Sorting and automation: hoppers feed into and out of chests, which is why every item sorter ends in rows of them

Chest Quirks Worth Knowing

Chests do not burn. Fire can lick across the top and lava can flow around them without destroying the box or its contents — but explosions are another story, and a creeper blast will take the chest and spill or destroy the contents. Pistons cannot move chests in Java Edition (they can in Bedrock). And for a few days each year, from December 24 to 26, every chest in the game swaps its texture for a wrapped Christmas present — red for single chests, green for doubles. It is purely cosmetic, and changing your computer's date triggers it whenever you like.

If other players are the threat rather than creepers, a regular chest offers no protection at all: anyone can open it or break it. That is the problem the ender chest solves — its contents are tied to you personally, and only you can see inside your own. Until then, eight planks and an empty center slot are all that stand between you and a very full inventory.