DEEP DIVES

In the vast world of Minecraft, even simple items can play an outsized role in your explorations. Just think about how important wood planks are, for example – you wouldn’t have a crafting bench without them, and without a crafting bench you wouldn’t be able to make much.
在 Minecraft 无垠的世界中，平凡的物品也可能会在探索中派上大用场。想想木板吧，若是没了它们你就无法获得工作台，更不必说更为深入的发展了。

Another item that seems unimportant but actually unlocks a lot of vital tools for the explorer-on-the-go is paper. Without it, there’d be no maps, enchanting, fireworks, or banner patterns. Let’s follow the paper trail, and find out how – crowning it as our item of the month in the process!
有一件看似没用的东西能给探险家们提供许多重要的工具——纸。没有了纸，地图、附魔、烟花、旗帜图案都将不复存在。让我们一起探寻它的前世今生，同时看看它是如何成为本月物品的！

Paper was added to the game, alongside sugarcane and bookshelves, early in Minecraft’s history – as part of the sixth Seecret Friday Update in July 2010. To make it, you’ll need sugarcane – put three into a crafting grid and you’ll get three sheets of paper out. You can also sometimes find paper in shipwrecks, strongholds, and chests belonging to village cartographers.
纸在 Minecraft 中的历史十分久远，它在 2010 年 7 月作为秘密周五更新6的一部分与甘蔗和书架一同被加入了游戏。你需要甘蔗来制作纸——将三个甘蔗放进合成栏里可以合成三张纸。在沉船、要塞和制图师的箱子里同样可以看到纸的身影。

You can take those three sheets of paper and combine them with a piece of leather to get a book, or you can get eight pieces of paper and surround a compass with them to make a map. Add gunpowder to paper to get a firework rocket – the more gunpowder, the higher it’ll fly before exploding – and throw in a firework star if you want explosion effects.
三张纸和一块皮革可以合成一本书，用八张纸在指南针周围围一圈可以制得一张地图。纸和火药还能制作烟花火箭——火药越多，飞行时间就越长——如果你想让其爆炸，还可以加入烟火之星。

Paper is also a good way to get hold of emeralds. If you find a librarian or a cartographer in a village, there’s a decent chance that they’ll be willing to trade 24 sheets of paper for an emerald. That sounds like a lot of paper, but if you get a sugarcane farm going then you’ll be sorted in no time.
纸还是个获取大量绿宝石的好方法。图书管理员和制图师有概率会用一个绿宝石来换取 24 张纸。这听起来也许有点多，但如果你造一个甘蔗农场，这分分钟就可以解决。

Image credit: Meganbeckett27 // CC BY-SA 3.0
图片来源： Meganbeckett27 // 知识共享 署名-相同方式共享 3.0

The reason you need sugarcane to make paper refers to papyrus – a material used to write on by the people of Ancient Egypt, almost six thousand years ago. Papyrus was made by weaving together strips of the papyrus plant, which grows in wetland areas all around the Mediterranean. Papyrus is still used today in some cultures to make baskets, hats, and floor mats.
纸需要用甘蔗来制作的设定来源于近六千年前古埃及人用于书写的纸莎草纸。纸莎草纸由一条条纸莎草编成——这种植物生长在地中海沿岸的湿地上。时至今日，纸莎草仍在一些地区被用于制作篮子、帽子和地毯。

The type of paper that we tend to use today, though, was invented about two thousand years ago in China – and is made from wood pulp. It was largely made by hand until paper mills were developed in Baghdad around 800AD, though this technology didn’t arrive in Europe for another five hundred years. Even when it did, paper was still very expensive – especially in book-sized quantities.
然而，如今我们使用的纸是用木浆制成的，由两千年前的中国人发明。公元 800 年前后巴格达出现造纸厂之前，多数的纸都由手工制成。不过，这项技术五百年后才传到欧洲。就算后来这项技术得以传播，纸张仍十分贵重——特别是足以制书的纸量。

It wasn’t until the invention of steam-driven paper-making machines in the 19th century that paper began to get cheap enough for anyone to use it. Today, it’s made on enormous machines, some with reels 10 meters wide, that produce two kilometers of paper every minute. You’ll find it everywhere – it’s used in books, it’s used to cover walls in houses, it’s used in packaging, it’s used to make banknotes. It’s so cheap that we even use it to wipe our bottoms when we go to the toilet.
直到 19 世纪，蒸汽造纸机的发明才使得纸张的成本低至足以在普罗大众中流通。今天，造纸机十分庞大，有些卷筒足有 10 米宽，每分钟造纸量可达两公里。纸无处不在——它被用于印书，用作壁纸，用来包装，用作纸币。甚至上厕所时我们还会用到它——它实在太廉价了。

In Minecraft, though, paper-making is still a very manual process. So look after your paper, and it’ll look after you.
尽管如此，在 Minecraft 中造纸仍是个手工活。照顾好你的纸吧，它也会关心你的。




【透明色 译自官网 2023 年 08 月 04 日发布的 Paper；原作者 Duncan Geere】
【本文排版借助了：SPXX v2.4.14】