Minecraft: Most Useless Items

Summary

Recovery Compass: Useless for Hardcore players, but valuable for others to locate recent death spots.
Netherite Hoe: Expensive farming tool that offers little advantage over cheaper alternatives.
Clock: Rarely used item with little practical value compared to other ways of telling time.

Minecraft, famous for its hundreds of blocks and yearly updates, has a plethora of items for its millions of players to find and use. With that said, several of the items in the endless sandbox are far, far less useful than others, with several being completely and utterly useless.

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By Greg Gomez

Even with a sizable list of items that players can use, the most useless items easily come to mind, with the lack of value stemming from the general expense of the item compared to what it offers, to what the item can in the first place. From occasionally useful to completely useless, the absolute most useless items in Minecraft are obvious.

8 Recovery Compass

Valuable To Most, Useless To The Hardcore

The Recovery Compass is a strange item, as it is one of the few items, if perhaps the only item, whose usefulness depends entirely on the game's difficulty level. For most players, the Recovery Compass is a perfect way to locate a recent death spot that might've been in an unfamiliar area or if coordinates weren't shown. However, for players on Hardcore, the Recovery Compass does literally nothing.

Since dying on Hardcore prevents any respawning, the Recovery Compass is effectively a rare, dangerous trophy from the Ancient Cities in the Deep Dark. This distinct dichotomy between the item's usefulness makes it unique when comparing the numerous items available.

7 Netherite Hoe

Overkill And Overly-Expensive Farming Tool

A technically useful yet functionally useless item, the Netherite Hoe does function as intended, but the nature of this supremely expensive farming tool is the cause of it ultimately being useless. Everything the Netherite Hoe can do can be accomplished by a Wooden Hoe, with the only exception of the Netherite Hoe lasting infinitely longer.

While the Netherite Hoe offers a chunk of experience upon its creation with the Serious Dedication advancement, it still isn't worth the cost of a Netherite Ingot and Netherite Upgrade, unless the player has plenty of the endgame material to spare. For players that aren't trying to get every advancement, or don't want to waste the valuable Ancient Debris required to make Netherite, the Netherite Hoe is often ignored for its far cheaper variants.

6 Crossbow

Outclassed By An Older Weapon

Minecraft Player Sneaking With A Crossbow

There are very few options when it comes to weapons in Minecraft. For projectile weapons, there are technically two options, but there is actually just one. While the Bow offers infinite ammo, relatively high DPS output, and plenty of enchantments, the Crossbow offers next to nothing.

While the Crossbow is intriguing for its multi-shot spread and entity-piercing options, the immensly slown loading of the Crossbow coupled with its lack of convenience compared to the Bow's infinite ammo is a death sentence for the weapon. The Crossbow can remain loaded indefinitely while the Bow needs to be drawn, which offers a potential for instant damage, but in any actual instance of needing to fight long-distance, the Crossbow is better left in the chest.

5 Clock

Rarely Used And Rarely Needed

Clocks are perhaps one of Minecraft's most forgotten items, along with not being tremendously useful. In very specific circumstances, such as being underground for prolonged periods, knowing the time of day can be helpful, but in almost all cases, the addition of this Redstone contraption in the player's inventory does next to nothing.

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Unfortunately for the Clock, merely looking up at the sky is the most convenient and efficient way of learning the time in the game. The weather may occasionally impact the usefulness of this strategy, but even then, the presence or lack of monsters also serves as a dead giveaway, not to mention the general unimportance of the specific time in-game.

4 Spyglass

Functional But Unnecessary

Minecraft's Alex in a boat with a chest, holding a map and amber spyglass as it sails the ocean with an allay.

Even during its reveal at Minecraft Live, players were keen to point out how the Spyglass doesn't offer much when the immensely popular mod OptiFine adds a zoom button to the vanilla game. Given how practically all popular Minecraft mods are used by countless players, the Spyglass was practically dead on arrival.

While the additional zoom is functionally helpful, especially for the numerous younger players who don't use mods, and the Spyglass zoom is better than the modded zoom, the additional space required for the Spyglass in the inventory on top of the general lack of need for zooming in does not help its case.

3 Golden Tools

Famously And Fashionably Useless

Golden Tools are perhaps the most infamously useless items in Minecraft, and the reason for their lack of fans is immediately apparent. Golden Tools may boast the highest mining speed and receive the best enchantments more easily than all other tools, but it's their durability that ruins their reputation.

Given that all Golden Tools and Weapons break in less than 35 uses, it isn't any wonder why they are often deemed as the most useless set of items in the game. The Golden Pickaxe can't mine blocks beyond Stone and Coal Ore, which makes it completely pointless to make compared to the vastly more useful Iron option. Besides distracting Piglins, the Golden Tools are far from valuable.

2 Lingering Potion

Potently Pointless Potions

Minecraft tipped arrow Brewing Stand menu Lingering Potions

An item that most players don't even think about, the Lingering Potions are expensive, difficult to craft, and not useful at all. While having a throwable AOE potion is kind of helpful, the cost and involved process of making it easily outweigh any positives the small radius of poison or harmful effects could bring.

The Tipped Arrows, made with Lingering Potions, are moderately more useful, but even then, a standard enchanted Bow offers more than good enough damage. Since the key ingredient of the potion is Dragon's Breath, and potions are an often ignored aspect of Minecraft, combining the two means the Lingering Potion will remain forgotten.

1 Poisonous Potato

Completely Useless Crop

The Poisonous Potato is officially the most useless item, regardless of any other reason, beyond the fact that it exists to serve no beneficial purpose. Eating it poisons the player briefly, they cannot be composted, and they cannot be used in any other way. On top of that, these Potatoes are a 2% drop from fully grown Potatoes, making them rare and pointless.

Many items in Minecraft may not be inherently useful, but only the Poisonous Potato has been stated to be intentionally useless. Even for players with thousands of hours in the game, this food remains little more than garbage. The Poisonous Potato is the cream of the useless crop, and will forever be the most useless item in Minecraft.

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