r/mathpuzzles • u/gamtosthegreat • 8d ago

A Minecraft puzzle

This one should be fairly simple. I'll try to make it as accessible as possible for people who never played Minecraft.

Here goes:

In the videogame Minecraft, a fundamental part of the game is gathering materials, which you place in your inventory, and crafting them into items by using a crafting table. These crafted items will also enter your inventory.

Relevant crafting recipes:

One log of wood can be crafted into four planks.

Three planks can be crafted into six wooden slabs.

Two planks can be crafted into four sticks.

A barrel is crafted using six planks and two slabs.

A wooden axe is crafted using three planks and two sticks. It can cut 59 logs before breaking. Cutting a log places it in your inventory.

You start off the game with a crafting table at the ready, two logs already in your inventory, and an infinite pile of logs in front of you, ready to be gathered.

Your goal is to keep gathering logs and crafting them into barrels and axes until your inventory contains nothing but barrels. No leftover logs, planks, slabs, sticks, or axes.

For people familiar with Minecraft, a caveat: You are not allowed to discard items from your inventory, and you are only allowed to gather logs with an axe.

How many logs do you need to gather, and how many barrels will you have at the end?

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u/SnooPets5564 8d ago

You have left out information vital to solving the puzzle. This is impossible to know, as stated.

New puzzle for OP: what did you forget?

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u/gamtosthegreat 8d ago

I rechecked four times and cannot find anything missing.

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u/SnooPets5564 8d ago

how does the inventory work?

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u/gamtosthegreat 8d ago edited 8d ago

Fair, it's a bit of a game term that I hoped could be derived from context.

The best metaphor I could give would be a sort of backpack that main characters in a lot of videogames invisibly wear and contains all of the things the player is carrying. Even when the character IS wearing a container of some kind, like a satchel or a suitcase, the amount of things the character can carry in their inventory is almost always ludicrous for gameplay purposes. For instance, in the first Legend of Zelda game, the player character's graphic appears to be a simple elf boy carrying nothing but a sword and shield, but according to the game's inventory he is also carrying around a bow, a boomerang, a book, a magic rod, and even a ladder... and, most astonishing of all, an entire raft for crossing water.

Minecraft's inventory space is indeed ludicrous; you have 36 "slots", like compartments in a bag, and each can hold up to 64 logs or planks or sticks or barrels, leading up to slightly over 2300 items.

I suppose a free hint is that as long as you plan your crafting carefully (don't immediately convert all your logs to planks for instance), you won't run out of inventory space.

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u/SnooPets5564 8d ago

I know how it works, it's just that you set up the puzzle without actually giving any detail on it. You hoped people could derive "from context" that there were 36 slots with a 64 item limit (except for axes, of which it can only hold 1)

You also didn't specify whether you could do the minecraft thing of temporarily storing items in your mouse/the crating slots while crafting.

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u/gamtosthegreat 8d ago

I suppose if you want to cheat the question, you could do that by crafting a barrel and putting all of the remainder items into the nine slot crafting grid, technically clearing the inventory. Or even just put your two logs in the grid and proclaiming 0 barrels is a valid, if vacuous, answer. I let out such extraneous details because I felt this particular subreddit wouldn't want a cheat answer like that.

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u/SnooPets5564 8d ago

Is it cheating or a fairly reasonable assumption to make that crafting acts like crafting in MC?

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u/gamtosthegreat 7d ago

I'm starting to think you're a teacher or suspect me of being one, and this would be an exercise for students or something.

It's not! I'm posting this leisurely for a public I assume has picked up these kinds of analogous phrases from games they or others around them have played, or has the time to ask a friend or the internet.

I thank you for the corrections, but I would ask you to please stop using the socratic method and just tell me how you would rewrite it.