What is a great inventory crusher for Minecraft?

What is the best way to compress my inventory after a long mining trip? I have 459 iron ore 69 gold, 120 coal and thousands of rocks. Any advice?

Solution 1:

If you want to carry stuff to your main base with minimal number of trips you can effectively double your carrying capacity by placing an ender chest at the mining site and in your base. Then you can put items in ender chest and unload them at your base, as well as carry items with you. Also, smelting iron and gold and creating blocks out of them will save you some space.

Ender chests are reusable if destroyed with silk touch pickaxe btw, so you don't need to waste an Eye of Ender.

Solution 2:

Ores and coal can be crafted into blocks, 9 of an ore\coal makes one block which can later be broken back down into it's respective peices.

Solution 3:

Well first off you probably want to smelt that iron ore and then make yourself a set of tools, and armor. You can use some of the coal you got to smelt those ores or you could make some charcoal (renewable) to do the same.

For the rest of it you can just make some wooden chests and store them in there. That is all I can think of for "crushing" inventory.