How to Make Paper in Minecraft

Paper looks humble, but it quietly unlocks half the game. Books for your enchanting setup, maps for exploring, firework rockets for Elytra flight, banner patterns for decorating — all of them trace back to paper. Luckily it is also one of the easiest items to produce in bulk once you know where its one ingredient grows.

The Paper Crafting Recipe

Paper needs exactly one ingredient: sugar cane. Place three sugar cane side by side in any row of a crafting table and you will get three pieces of paper back. That is the only crafting recipe for paper in the game, and it has not changed in years.

Finding Sugar Cane Fast

Sugar cane grows on grass, dirt or sand directly beside water, usually in stalks three or four blocks tall. It can appear in any Overworld biome, but you will find noticeably more of it in swamps and deserts, where shallow water is everywhere. Walk a desert riverbank for a few minutes and you will usually come home with a stack or more.

A few things worth knowing about sugar cane:

• Bone meal does not work on it. Sugar cane grows at a fixed rate, so the only way to get more is more plants — or a farm.
• Harvest from the second block up. Leave the bottom block in place and the stalk regrows on its own.
• Bamboo is not a substitute. Despite the similar look, bamboo cannot be turned into paper at all.
• Wandering traders occasionally sell sugar cane for an emerald if you are truly stuck.

For serious quantities, build a small observer-and-piston sugar cane farm at your base. It runs itself while you do other things, and you will never think about paper scarcity again.

Where to Find Paper Without Crafting

Exploring pays off too. Paper generates in chests in three kinds of structures:

Stronghold libraries deserve a special mention: many players go there hunting books, and since a book is really just paper plus leather, looting readymade books can skip the paper step entirely.

What Paper Is Used For

• Books — three paper plus one leather. Books become bookshelves, and fifteen bookshelves around an enchanting table unlock maximum-level enchantments.
• Maps — eight paper around a compass on Java; nine paper with no compass on Bedrock. Paper also zooms a map out at a cartography table.
• Cartography tables — two paper plus four planks, and the block doubles as the cartographer's job site.
• Firework rockets — one paper plus one to three gunpowder. Plain rockets are the fuel for Elytra flight, so endgame players burn through paper by the stack.
• Banner patterns — one paper plus a special item such as a creeper head or an oxeye daisy.
• Trading — librarians and cartographers buy paper and pay in emeralds, making a sugar cane farm a tidy little emerald engine.

Three sugar cane, three paper, endless uses. Set up even a modest sugar cane patch early and this is one resource you will never have to think about again.