You’re standing in the middle of a pixelated field. Maybe you just spawned, or maybe you just died and lost everything. Either way, you need a tool, and you can’t make a pickaxe without that thin, brown line of pixels. Understanding how to find a stick in minecraft is basically the first real "test" the game throws at you. It sounds simple. It is simple, mostly. But if you’re stuck in a desert or a vast ocean biome, that simplicity disappears pretty fast.
Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way first. You don't actually "find" sticks lying on the ground like you might find a rock in real life. Minecraft doesn't work that way. Usually, you have to make them. But if you’re allergic to crafting tables or you’re doing some weird "no-crafting" challenge, there are actually ways to stumble across them in the wild.
The Manual Way: Punching Trees and Crafting
The absolute fastest way to get a stick is to find a tree. Any tree. Oak, birch, spruce, jungle—it doesn't matter. You punch the wood. You get a log.
Here is the thing people forget: one single log gives you four planks. Two planks give you four sticks. Do the math. One log equals four sticks. That is enough for two pickaxes or a sword and a shovel. It’s the most efficient conversion rate in the early game. You just open your inventory (press 'E' on PC), toss the log in the 2x2 crafting square to get planks, then stack two planks vertically. Boom. Sticks.
Finding Sticks in the Wild (No Crafting Required)
Sometimes you just don't want to craft. Or maybe you're in a pinch.
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Dead Bushes are a Life Saver
If you are stranded in a desert or a badlands biome, trees are basically nonexistent. You'll see those little shriveled-up grey plants. Those are dead bushes. Most players ignore them. Don't. If you break a dead bush with your bare hand, there is a very high chance it will drop 0 to 2 sticks. It’s arguably the only way to survive a "Desert Only" survival map.
Leaves and the Luck of the Draw
When you're finished cutting down the trunk of a tree, the leaves start to decay. You've probably seen them disappearing one by one. Every time a leaf block vanishes (or every time you punch one), there is a 2% chance it drops a stick.
- Pro Tip: If you have a tool with the Fortune enchantment, those odds go up.
- Reality Check: Don't rely on this. You'll spend ten minutes punching leaves just to get three sticks. It’s a waste of hunger bars.
Bonus Loot: Chests and Fishing
Sticks show up in the weirdest places. If you find a Bonus Chest (if you toggled that on when you made the world), it almost always has sticks. Village chests, especially in toolmaker or fletcher houses, are usually packed with them.
Then there's fishing. Honestly, fishing for sticks is like trying to win a prize at a fair and coming home with a toothpick. It's technically possible to catch them as "junk," but if you're fishing for sticks, you’ve probably reached a level of desperation that requires a new world seed.
Why Witches are Your Best Friends (and Worst Enemies)
If you're looking for a renewable way to get sticks without ever touching a tree again, you need to find a Witch. Witches are one of the few mobs that actually drop sticks when they die.
They can drop up to 6 sticks at once. If you build a Witch farm—which involves finding a Witch Hut in a swamp and using some pretty advanced redstone and spawning mechanics—you will eventually have double-chests full of sticks. It's overkill. It's definitely overkill. But for technical players who want to automate everything, it's the gold standard.
The Misconception About Bamboo
A lot of players think they can use bamboo as a stick. You can't. Not directly. If you're in a Jungle biome, you might have thousands of bamboo stalks but zero sticks.
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To turn bamboo into a stick, you have to craft two bamboo into a single plank first (in the Java edition, this was a relatively recent addition). Then you take those planks and make sticks. It’s a two-step process that catches people off guard because bamboo looks like a stick. It just doesn't act like one until it's processed.
Dealing with Biome Struggles
Where you are on the map completely changes how to find a stick in minecraft.
- The Ocean: You are looking for shipwrecks. Period. The supply chests in shipwrecks are almost guaranteed to have wood or sticks.
- The Nether: This is where it gets tricky. There are no "traditional" trees. You have to find the huge fungi (the red or blue "trees"). You can turn those into planks and then into sticks. If you're in a soul sand valley, you're out of luck unless you find a Fortress chest.
- The End: There are no sticks here. None. If you go to the End without a stack of wood, you are relying entirely on End City loot chests.
Actionable Steps for Your New World
If you just started a fresh save, follow this sequence to ensure you never run out of materials.
Stop running. Find the nearest tree immediately. You don't need a forest; a single tree is plenty. Punch enough wood to get exactly two logs. Convert those into planks, make a crafting table, and turn the rest into sticks. Craft a wooden pickaxe.
Now, find stone. Once you have stone, your wooden tools are obsolete. But those sticks? You'll still need them for your stone tools. Never throw away sticks. Even when you get to the endgame and you're using Netherite, that $1000$ degree sword is still held together by a simple wooden stick you probably made from a piece of oak.
If you find yourself in a wasteland, look for the dead bushes. Break every single one you see. It is the difference between getting a stone age start and dying of hunger because you couldn't craft a sword to hunt a rabbit.
Always keep at least half a stack of logs in your inventory. Logs are "compressed" sticks. One stack of logs represents 256 sticks. That's the best way to manage your inventory space while staying prepared for a long underground mining session where you’ll need hundreds of torches.