Want to Get Flint in ‘Minecraft’ Fast? Here Are Some Ways to Get the Raw Material

One of the most engaging/addictive elements of Minecraft is the fact that there's just so much to do in the title. You can raise animals, make little in-game computers and mess around with cheats, uncover hidden lands, and engage in a slew of story missions that you can add into the game. But the heart of the gameplay lies in the title's, er, title itself: mining and crafting. This is accomplished by getting your hands on a variety of different raw materials — like flint — in the game.

Here's how to get your boxy little hands on some flint.

First off: What is flint? It's not just a town in Michigan or something you use to start a fire on a survivalist game show; it's a material you use in Minecraft to make flint and steel and arrows.

You can obtain flint by mining gravel, but there's only a 10% chance that when you crack a gravel brick open it'll drop flint instead of a chunk of the stone.

But there's a way to up those percentages, as that 1/10 metric only applies whenever you're mining around without an enchanted tool. But you can add Fortune enchantments to up those percentages, and here's a breakdown of how much more of a chance you'll have at mining flint if you add these enchantments.

Fortune 1: 14%

Fortune 2: 25%

Fortune 3: 100%

Yeah, that's right, if you can get the Fortune 3 enchantment on your mining tool, then you're going to have a very, very easy time of securing yourself all of the flint that you want in Minecraft.

You can use pretty much any tool or just your bare hands to mine gravel in Minecraft, but the quickest way to do so will be with your shovel.

Once you got your tool ready, make sure you've got yourself a decked-out enchanting table that is surrounded by bookshelves which will help you get even stronger enchantments.

You'll also need some lapis lazuli and experience points you get from breeding, trading, mining, killing bad guys, etc., and you'll be good to go.

In terms of mining it quickly, YouTuber @Flascoe came up with a pretty great method: by pressing the right and left mouse buttons down at the same time after you've got gravel equipped in one hand and your enchanted shovel in another, you'll be able to set and mine flint very quickly.

First, the gamer suggests creating a small structure out of gravel blocks in order to get this done as fast as possible, which they've delineated quite thoroughly in the video below.

If you wanted to use flint to make arrows, make sure you've got yourself a feather and a stick as well, otherwise you won't be able to craft them. Putting together "flint and steel" is about as straightforward as it sounds: get one unit of flint and one iron unit in the crafting grid and voilà.

Of course, you could always trade for flint with villagers or just try to mine it the old-fashioned way without enchantments, but if you're trying to get a lot of it more quickly, get those fortune enchantments!