Taking Inventory: Lapis Lazuli

What’s found deep underground, highly prized by both painters and Egyptian pharaohs, and is a deep shade of royal blue? No, not the leg bristles of a very cold spider – it’s our item of the week: lapis lazuli!

Lapis lazuli was added to Minecraft in version 1.2, at the same time as dispensers, beds, cake, birch and pine trees, and of course, the beloved note block. Its primary use is as a dye – it can change the colour of all sorts of things – from glass and terracotta to wolf collars, beds, banners, and shulker boxes.

The best way to find lapis lazuli is to mine it up from the depths of the overworld. Lapis lazuli ore is found close to bedrock, and drops 4-8 pieces of per block mined. With a fortune III enchantment, that rises to an impressive 32 pieces per block.

If you’re not in the mood for mining, clerics will trade you lapis lazuli for emeralds, and wandering traders keep some in stock too. The mineral is also found in chests in abandoned mineshafts, shipwrecks, and desert village temples.

It’s primarily a decorative item – as well as using it to dye other items, and in the enchantment process, it’ll also form up into a beautiful bright blue block that looks especially fantastic in magic-themed builds.

In the real world, lapis lazuli is a semi-precious stone beloved since ancient times for its deep blue colour. “Lapis” is actually just the latin word for stone, while “lazuli” derives from the Persian name for the area in modern-day Afghanistan where we’ve been digging it up since the 7th millennium BC. The word for blue in several languages, like the Spanish and Portuguese “azul”, derives from it too.

As well as the lapis mines in Afghanistan, it can also be found in the Andes, Siberia, Angola; Argentina; Burma; Pakistan; Canada; Italy, India; and in the United States in California and Colorado. But it’s far easier to make it synthetically – which has been possible since the early 19th century.

Lapis is actually a mixture of lots of different minerals. The intense blue colour comes from sulphur in the crystals of the mineral lazurite, but lapis lazuli also often contains calcite (white), sodalite (blue) and pyrite (gold-coloured). It’s made deep underground, where the extreme conditions of the Earth’s interior squeeze rocks together, forming new substances in the process.

So next time you’re deep below the surface, looking for the flash of blue on the walls that marks a deposit of lapis lazuli ore, remember that you’re doing something that humans have been doing for almost 10,000 years. And don’t worry – it took ages for them to find it too.