About Torch & Anvil
Torch & Anvil is a small, independent set of calculators and planners for Minecraft builders — circle charts, stack math, and the growing list on the tools page. It is maintained by one person, and its tools, guides and tests are produced under that person’s direction; how this site is made has the details. The rule is to ship one verified tool rather than ten guessed ones.
Editor
C. B. Zakarian (a pen name) is the owner and editor of Torch & Anvil. C. B. Zakarian holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems, with a focus on data science, from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2016), and is an assistant professor.
Since October 6, 2026, every new piece on Torch & Anvil is read and approved by C. B. Zakarian before it is published. Pages published earlier are being reviewed in weekly batches, and each reviewed page shows the date of its review.
The version-stamp doctrine
Minecraft changes. Anvil costs have changed, world height has changed, whole mechanics have been rebuilt across updates — and a tool site that ignores that fact slowly fills with confident wrong answers. So every tool here carries a visible stamp naming the game version its facts were last verified against and the date of that check. When a major update lands, affected tools get re-verified and their stamps move. A stale stamp is information too: it tells you exactly how far to trust the page.
Java and Bedrock, declared
The two editions of the game genuinely differ — in anvil behavior, brewing edge cases, world limits, and more. Averaging those differences produces numbers that are wrong everywhere. Each tool on this site declares which edition it models. Where both editions share the same facts, the page says that; where they diverge, the differences are spelled out instead of smoothed over.
What this site refuses to do
No drop-rate folklore beyond documented mechanics. No seed lists. No downloads, mods, or clients. No "free" anything that requires your account details — anything promising that is a scam, everywhere, always. The tools here model geometry and documented formulas, checked against the community-maintained Minecraft Wiki at minecraft.wiki — not the older Fandom mirror, which lags the current game. Where a second reference was consulted, the guide names it; where none is named, the wiki page and this site's own simulation are the whole of the evidence, and the page says so rather than gesturing at unnamed confirmation.
How the numbers stay honest
Each calculator's math lives in one JavaScript file with the algorithm written out in a comment at the top. That comment is a contract: a separate test re-implements the math from the comment rather than from the code, then asserts every figure the pages print — the circle generator's block counts, the stack calculator's container arithmetic, every worked example. Nothing ships while a page and its math disagree.
You do not have to take that on trust, because two of the three checks are in your hands. The calculator that produced a number is on the page next to it, so you can retype the inputs and watch the same figure come out; the source for each game constant is named at the foot of the matching guide, so you can read it at minecraft.wiki yourself. The part you cannot see — the test suite — is the part that keeps the site honest between the two.
Where a claim could not be verified cleanly, it is missing rather than guessed. The villager tool refuses to compute cure discounts because their arithmetic is undocumented; the brewing planner leaves out a disputed corruption pair; the enchanting guide declines to claim Bedrock parity it has not checked. Each of those refusals is printed on the page that makes it, and they are the most reliable signal on this site of how the rest was made.
Contact
Corrections are welcome and acted on — if a number here disagrees with the game in front of you, say so and include the version and edition you are playing. The fastest way to improve a tool site is a player with a counterexample.