Ten Rare Recipes

Put together a pickaxe, snap together a sword and assemble some armor and you’re all set for a perfectly adequate adventure in Minecraft!

But wait!

There might just be more to the game than that. Combining ingredients on the crafting grid can leave you with all manner of strange and wonderful items - some deadly, some delicious, some just rather nice to look at. Working out how to construct them can be tricky, so we thought we’d compile a brief list of our lesser-seen favourites, and hopefully inspire you to experiment with the recipe book a bit more!

Glazed Terracotta

You think of yourself as a pretty creative sort, right? So no doubt you’ll want your digs to be the coolest build on the block. One option is to spend hours laying down colorful patterns of dyed wool while fighting off interfering creepers and Enderman. But what if I told you there was an easier way to create colorful patterns - and at a more conveniently condensed scale? Enter glazed terracotta. First you’ll need to stain some ordinary terracotta, using an 8:1 block to dye ratio.

How’d you get dye, you ask? Well, luckily, the natural world is generous. Drop a poppy, rosebush or red tulip on a crafting grid and you can harvest the Rose Red dye. Dandelions or sunflowers give you yellow. You can probably figure out what plants produce orange dye (spoiler: they’re orange too). Bone meal will serve as a white dye, and squid ink sacs for black. Cocoa beans make a nice brown colour and lapis lazuli will make a nice deep blue. Once you’ve stained your terracotta to a hue of your choosing, stick it in a furnace with a suitable fuel, and smelt it into its final form: beautiful, colorful blocks, textured with ornate patterns, perfect for adorning smaller sized builds.

Concrete

Concrete is one of the newest blocks in Minecraft! Creating it takes a little work: first you need some concrete powder by combining sand and gravel along with the dye of your chosen colour.

Then you can place your concrete powder block - but take care! Concrete powder is affected by gravity and needs proper support. Pour some water on it, however, and it'll solidify into concrete and remain in place even if it’s undermined. More intensely coloured than stained terracotta, use concrete if you’re going for a bright blocks of uniform colour, that - handily enough - won’t burn to the ground like wool.

Golden Apple

Taking on the Ender Dragon, the Wither, or your pesky, thieving neighbors? You better stack up on some golden apples. These apples are powerful, providing Absorption I and Regeneration II all at once, giving you the edge you need to take down whatever may get in your way. The problem is, and the reason why it's so rare, is that it’s also expensive. Crafting a golden apple takes a whopping 8 gold ingots. Totally worth it though! Honestly! I promise!

Beacon

Ordinarily, a beacon is just a light source, albeit one with rather demanding crafting requirements (you have to defeat a Wither to get one of the main ingredients: a Nether Star).

But place the beacon on the top of a pyramid made from iron, gold, emerald or diamond blocks and you get something very special indeed. For one thing, a beam of light shoots out of the top of the beacon, right up into the sky, making it a rather attractive way of marking your location. You can change the colour of the light by placing stained glass above it, too.

More importantly, though, the beacon can provide different, powerful buffs to everyone in the near area, the exact enhancements depending on how big the pyramid beneath it is. There are four levels of power possible for each tier you add to the pyramid’s base.

Clicking on the beacon itself will let you pick and mix which buffs are available - though you’ll need to feed the beacon ingots to activate them. It’s quite the exhausting build in survival mode - but since when have pyramids been the cheap architectural option?

Daylight Sensor

Minecraft has many ways for you to power your doors, rails and extravagant contraptions, but you can’t always rely on being there in person to flip a switch. The daylight sensor is particularly useful for remotely and reliably activating your defence systems every time the sun goes down - keeping creepers and other nighttime nasties out of your home.

Sticky Piston

A sticky piston is just that: a piston with some slimy goo smered on the end so that adheres to the blocks it touches, letting it push and pull them. Sticky pistons require everything a piston does with the added ingredient of a slime ball, obtainable from slimes. Sticky pistons are a neat way of yanking up gates or creating trap doors - but they have other fun uses too. Layer a platform of slime blocks on top of a sticky piston, then hook it up to a pulsing redstone circuit, and you’ve created your own trampoline. Boing!

Potions

Sure, “potions” may be a broad category, but they’re one of the most useful yet unintuitive areas of crafting - and the secret to a successful attempt at any boss monster in Minecraft. Without a potion of water breathing, you’ll find getting down to Ocean Monuments pretty tricky. Meanwhile, a potion of regeneration comes in useful in nearly any combat encounter. Other players giving you grief? Then lingering splash potions will keep pursuers off your case.

You’ll need a brewing stand:

And a glass bottle. Once crafted use it on a water source to fill it up!

And you’ll need a host of reagents to make and modify various concoctions. Base ingredients create the first stage of your potion. Nether wart is the base for nearly every potion in the game. The Fermented Spider’s Eye will only make a potion of weakness. You can use other bases ingredients, but you won’t make anything useful. Secondary ingredients (sugar, magma cream, spider eyes, rabbit feet, puffer fish, golden carrots, glistering melons, blaze powder and ghast tears) then define the effect of the potion, and tertiary ingredients (redstone dust, glowstone dust, gunpowder, dragon’s breath, fermented spider eyes) will modify it.

Once you've assembled all the ingredients you need for a heady brew, click on your brewing stand to bring up the brewing interface. You'll have to fuel the stand with some blaze powder - you'll see that part of the diagram starts glowing a hot orange. Now put a water-filled flask in one of the three slots at the bottom of the apparatus and some nether wart in the top. You'll see a progress bar start to fill up - you're brewing up an Awkward Potion! It's the essential base for nearly every potion recipe in the game. Once the progress bar is done, and you have an awkward potion in hand, put it right back in the apparatus where you had it the first time for the second stage of brewing. Now you can add one of a large number of reagents at the top for a variety of effects. In the example below, we've added a Ghast Tear. That'll give you a Potion of Regeneration. Handy!

Magma Cream will give you a Potion of Fire Resistance; a Golden Carrot will give you Night Vision; Blaze Powder a potion of Strength... and so on. There are further optional stages of brewing too! Adding a Fermented Spider Eye to a potion will usually flip the effect, turning a Potion of Healing into a Potion of Harming. Adding Gunpowder will make it a Splash Potion (a potion you can throw) and then adding Dragon's Breath afterwards will make it a Lingering Potion (so the effect contaminates an area for a period of time). Other ingredients, like Redstone or Glowstone dust, will either increase the duration or potency of the effect.

Get brewing!

Pumpkin Pie

There are a host of sweet treats you make for your friends (or yourself.) Everyone knows you can bake a cake, but did you know there’s also pie? Pumpkin pie to be exact. It’s way cheaper than baking a cake, costing only a pumpkin, some sugar, and an egg - versus the bucket, the milk, the wheat, the sugar, and the egg it takes to make a cake. It’s also better for you per bite, restoring 8 hunger versus the 2 hunger per slice of cake.

Note Block

Feel the music in Minecraft with note blocks. Made of wood and redstone, constructing a note block is easy. It gets complicated when you throw in instruments and note pitches. A note block will produce a different instrumental sound based on whatever block it’s sitting on. A note block on grass makes a clicking noise, while a note block on wood sounds like a string base, and so forth and so on. By changing the different blocks under your note block you can create a variety of sounds, making your very own Minecraft orchestra.

Trapped Chest

Imagine you’ve made your own adventure realm. You’re creating a story for your players to experience. The adventures have bested the dungeon’s deadliest foes, skipped happily over your web of trip wires, and danced around all the pressure plates you so carefully placed. Damn them. But nothing wipes the smirk an adventurer’s face like a teasure chest loaded with TNT. That’s the sweet vengeance a trapped chest can bring. First you’ll need a tripwire hook!

Then simply combine it with a chest! A trapped chest produces a redstone-like effect when opened and can be used to power just about anything. Use it cause mayhem for your players or to keep your thieving Realm neighbors from getting at your good stuff.

There are loads more recipes out there for you to discover. Thankfully you won’t have to trawl wikis forever to find them - we added a recipe book to Minecraft which will prompt you with handy recipe hints when you start to accumulate useful ingredients. So explore and experiment!