Climbing & Rope

You can get up and down a cliff or a tree without a ladder. Climbing is slow, burns stamina, and drops you if your stamina runs out mid-climb.

Climbing through leaves

A tree canopy works like scaffolding:

• Stand on top of a canopy and you can climb up through it.
• Crouch to lower yourself down through the leaves.

It is slow — about 0.4× the speed of a ladder — and climbing up costs roughly 12 stamina per block (dropping back down through the leaves is free). A ~6 metre tree consumes most of a full stamina bar. Wading through foliage on foot also slows you to about half speed.

Free-climbing walls

You can free-climb a flat, at-least-two-block-tall wall — no height limit — at a slow pace, but only on rough, natural faces: raw rock, tree trunks, and earth (stone, cobblestone, logs, dirt, gravel, sand, sandstone, terracotta — the badlands cliffs — and the like). Smooth or finished faces — planks, bricks, glass, metal, polished stone — offer no grip, so you need a rope or ladder for those.

You climb with your hands, so your selected hotbar slot must be empty — put your tool or weapon away to get a grip (holding something drops you off the wall). Vanilla ladders and vines aren't affected; you climb those with a full hand as normal.

• It costs about 25 stamina per block, up or down (a full stamina bar buys roughly four blocks).
• Run out of stamina mid-climb and you fall. Even with stamina to spare, your grip can slip at random — more likely the more tired you are — and drop you off the wall. See Survival Meters & HUD for reading your stamina.
• You can't climb at all while carrying more than ~25 kg. See Weight, Carrying & Blocks.

Rope

Rope makes a cliff a free, ladder-speed climb.

• Craft a coil from string: 3 string → 3 rope. (String itself comes from twisting plant fiber — see Tools & Crafting.)

→

- **Aim at a block face** and use the coil to anchor a rope that hangs down **one block**. Use the coil on the **top** of that line again to **pay out another length**. Each length heads straight down, but if the space directly below is blocked it **routes sideways** into an open neighbour to work around a ledge and keep descending. - The hanging rope **climbs like a ladder**: **full-speed and safe** both up and down, with no fall risk. Crouch to lower yourself down. Hanging on it costs a **small, steady trickle of stamina** — far less than free-climbing rock. - **Break the top of the line** to reel it back in **one length at a time**, recovering a coil for each — the rope can be used again elsewhere.

Quick comparison

Method	Speed	Stamina cost	Risk
Rope	Full (ladder)	Small (grip trickle)	Safe
Climbing through leaves	~0.4× ladder	~12/block (up only)	Fall if stamina runs out
Free-climbing a wall	Slow (~0.3× ladder)	~25/block	Fall if stamina runs out, or a random slip

In all cases, overloading (>~25 kg) blocks climbing entirely — rope excepted, since rope is treated like a ladder.