Arrow

Overview

Arrows are the ammunition every ranged weapon except the trident runs on, and how you supply them shapes your whole early game. One craft of flint, a stick and a feather gives 4 arrows, which sounds fine until a skeleton fight costs a dozen. The three practical supplies are a skeleton farm, which gives arrows and bones and experience at once; a fletcher villager, who sells 16 arrows for a single emerald at novice level and is the fastest fix on a fresh world; and picking your own shots back up, since any arrow that hits a block rather than a mob can be collected again. Arrows fired from a fully drawn bow deal 6 to 11 damage and travel about 64 blocks before they fall short; fired underwater they slow almost immediately. They stack to 64, which means a full stack is roughly one good cave trip. Two special variants exist — Spectral Arrows mark a target through walls, and Tipped Arrows apply a potion effect — and both are built from the ordinary arrow you already have. Keep a stack in the ender chest at all times.

Feeding a bow, a crossbow or a dispenser — and, in a dispenser aimed along a corridor, forming the damage layer of a mob farm or a base defence with no player present.

In Minecraft, Arrow is a weapon item. A full stack holds 64. It drops from Bogged, Skeleton, and Stray.

You make it with Flint, Stick, and Feather. The one thing it makes is Spectral Arrow.

How to get it

Craft 4 from 1 Flint, 1 Stick and 1 Feather. Novice fletcher villagers sell 16 arrows for 1 emerald, and skeletons drop 0 to 2 arrows each, up to 5 with Looting III.

Tips

Pick up your misses: any arrow that lands in a block is recoverable, and that halves the real cost of a fight.
A fletcher at novice level selling 16 arrows per emerald is the cheapest arrow supply in the game.
Arrows fired by a dispenser cannot be picked up by mobs, which makes dispenser traps safe against skeletons.
Keep one arrow in the inventory if your bow has Infinity — it will not fire without at least a single ordinary arrow.