Taking Inventory: Spyglass - Minecraft

Skip to Main Content Deep Dives Written By Duncan Geere Published 2/17/22 Taking Inventory: Spyglass

What's on the horizon?

Some things in Minecraft, like seeds, are very small. Other things just look small because they’re far away. Until recently it was literally impossible to tell the difference. Luckily, in the first part of the Caves and Cliffs update, we added an item that can help. It’s the spyglass, and it’s our item of the week.

Spyglasses make far-away things larger so you can see them more clearly. You can zoom in on anything, allowing you to see if that green blob on the horizon is a birch tree or a rapidly-approaching creeper. Useful!

You’re probably wondering how to get one. Well, you’re going to need to make it. Get yourself some copper ingots, by smelting raw copper, and then vertically combine two of them in a crafting bench with a shard of amethyst to act as a lens. If you get the recipe right, a spyglass will be yours.

Interestingly, the spyglass actually has a slightly different effect depending on what field-of-view (FOV) your game is set to on the options screen. By default, Java edition has a FOV of 70° and Bedrock edition has a slightly-more-zoomed-in FOV of 60°, but that can be changed to whatever you want. Whatever it’s set to, a spyglass will give you a tenth of it, creating a zoom effect.

In the real world, no-one’s exactly sure who invented the spyglass. The earliest written record we have is from a patent application filed by spectacle-maker Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands in 1608, which wasn’t granted because another inventor filed a similar patent a few weeks later, and so the judge figured that everyone knew about it already.

Nonetheless, word of Lippershey’s patent application spread across Europe and reached astronomer Galileo Galilei, who refined the design substantially in the next few years – taking it from 3x magnification to 8x, and then an impressive 23x. With this 23x telescope, he discovered the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, and the rotation of the Sun.

Why did we name it “spyglass”? Because Minecraft dev Felix Jones wanted to be a pirate! Above: an example of how stained glass caused rendering issues when looking through the spyglass. Poor sheep!

Today, our telescopes are much more powerful. So powerful, in fact, that we need to blast them into space because our dusty atmosphere limits what we can see. On 25 December 2021, the most advanced space telescope ever built was launched aboard a rocket from French Guiana. The James Webb Space Telescope, as it’s known, will send back images of stars up to 13.3 billion light-years from Earth – right on the edge of the visible Universe.

No one’s ever explored what’s beyond the atmosphere of the Overworld in Minecraft. So point your spyglass upward when night falls, and let us know what you see.

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