The world in Minecraft is sprawling and can be an easy place to lose your way. Knowing how to make a beacon can be one of the best ways to mark a location you’d like to return to later. Besides a sense of direction, beacons can also light up your creations as a powerful light source and can even provide helpful benefits that modify the gameplay experience for nearby players. Using beacons may be a way to add excitement to your game, but making one requires some advanced materials that may be trickier to acquire than some basic crafting ingredients. Fortunately, you’ll be able to find all of them and make your own activated beacon using our guide!
Creating a Beacon Guide
Time needed: 20 minutes.
To make a beacon in Minecraft, you’ll need to gather a combination of easily found items and some more high-level items. Crafting a beacon requires a few blocks each of glass and obsidian as well as a Nether star. These items will get you a beacon, but you’ll still need to activate it by placing it on top of a pyramid made out of specific types of blocks. It can be a lot of work, but the benefits make it worth the effort!
- Find Glass
Glass is a good place to start since it’s the simplest of the materials you’ll need. Making your own is an easy and approachable option for getting glass. To create glass, you will need to find some sand and place it in a furnace to transform it into glass blocks. You’ll need 5 pieces of glass to have enough to make a beacon, and it must be plain glass blocks – glass panes or stained glass won’t work.
You can find and mine some glass if you have a tool with Silk Touch equipped as an alternative to crafting it. There is a chance to find glass rooms in woodland mansions, which can be found in dark forests where you’ll find enemy mobs even during the daytime.
- Find Obsidian
You’ll need to get some obsidian once you’ve found all the glass that’s required. It takes 3 blocks of obsidian to make a beacon in Minecraft, and it can only be mined using a Netherite or diamond pickaxe. Known by most as lava rock, obsidian can be acquired by dumping a bucket of water on to lava, scooping the water back into the bucket, and mining the black bricks that remain in place of the lava. Be sure to mine it with the right tool, or you won’t get anything when it breaks!
- Get a Nether Star
Hopefully finding glass and mining that obsidian were good warmups. You’ll need a Nether star in order to make a beacon, and to get one you’re going to have to defeat the Wither. The Wither, a boss mob in Minecraft, drops a single Nether star when defeated. This is the only way to get a Nether star, which makes it a requirement for crafting a beacon. The Wither can be made using 4 blocks of soul sand or soul soil arranged with 1 block on the bottom and the other 3 blocks centered on top of it (like a “T”). Across the top of this shape, place 3 wither skeleton skulls. Be sure one of the skulls is the last item placed. Immediately after doing this, get ready to fight! Find a crafting table after defeating the Wither and looting its Nether star so you can finally craft a beacon!
- Crafting a Beacon
When you’ve gathered your materials, all that’s left to make a beacon in Minecraft is to head to a crafting table. You must arrange 5 blocks of glass in the squares around the upper perimeter of the crafting grid with the obsidian blocks filling the bottom 3 squares and the Nether star taking up the remaining spot in the middle. It will not work unless it’s arranged this way, so be sure to get the pattern right. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have a beacon that can be added to your inventory!
- Activate a Beacon
Knowing how to craft a beacon is helpful, but it’s not enough to get you all of the benefits of having a beacon. Your beacon must be activated in order for you to access all it has to offer. Luckily, the simplest way to activate a beacon requires just a few more steps! A beacon can be activated using blocks of either iron, gold, diamond, or emerald. If you’re using the Bedrock version, be sure to check out our guide on how to find iron in Minecraft if you need help finding ingredients for your pyramid blocks. We also have a guide on how to find diamonds in Bedrock if you decide to make and use diamond blocks.
Just arrange 9 blocks of any of these types (in any combination) in a 3×3 arrangement. After doing this, place your beacon on top of the center block. You should see it immediately begin to emit bright light far into the sky. Now your beacon is activated! Be sure to access the beacon menu to see the status effect options you have for a 1-tier pyramid (haste and speed), and plan for how you can use your beacon with even bigger pyramids!
That’s everything you need to know about how to make a beacon in Minecraft! If you want to learn more about the game, be sure to check out the Minecraft section of our website.
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