How To Make A Beacon In Minecraft

In Minecraft, a Beacon is a block that allows players to gain helpful status effects when paired with a pyramid. It can also help players find their base, as the Beacon shines a beam directly into the sky. To see the entire crafting process for the Beacon in Minecraft, check out the guide below.

Making a Beacon in Minecraft

While the Beacon does require some easy materials for its recipe, it’s certainly not considered an early-game item in Minecraft. It only becomes useful after players create a pyramid made of different metals and features one mid-late game resource that’s quite difficult to come by. You can see the exact crafting recipe for the Beacon below.

Beacon crafting recipe

• Place five Glass blocks, three across the top row of a crafting table and two on either side of the middle box
• Place a Nether Star in the middle box
• Fill out the crafting table with three Obsidian blocks

How to get Obsidian

Glass blocks are extremely simple to obtain, especially if you follow our previous guide on getting them. The Obsidian is also easy to add to your inventory, but only after you’ve crafted a Diamond Pickaxe. To produce Obsidian, all you have to do is run a water source over a source of lava. This is usually done by pouring a bucket of water over a pool of lava, as each block in the pool is considered a lava source, making all the blocks turn to Obsidian. However, you can only produce Obsidian wherever there’s lava, provided you have some water. The difficult part is Obsidian can only be mined using a Diamond Pickaxe, so you’ll have to get one of those before you can even think about getting Obsidian.

How to get a Nether Star

The final resource you need for the crafting recipe is the Nether Star. This is only obtained by killing the Wither in Minecraft, and its sole purpose is to craft Beacons. You can spawn the Wither yourself by placing four Soul Sand/Soul Soil blocks in the shape of a “T” and then putting three Wither Skeleton Skulls on top of the three upper blocks. You can loot Wither Skeleton Skulls by killing Wither Skeletons in Nether Fortresses.

The Wither is an extremely hostile boss when it spawns in, so you need to be ready for it. It has 300 HP on easy mode, 450 HP on normal, and 600 HP on hard. When the Wither spawns, you want to back away from it, as the boss creates an explosion around the area when it first comes to life. Fortunately, the Wither is guaranteed to drop a Nether Star every time you kill it.

How to use a Beacon

With your Nether Star, complete the crafting recipe and you’ll have your Beacon in Minecraft. You can’t just place the Beacon on the ground for it to work, though. It needs to have an unobstructed view upwards to the sky and is required to be placed on top of a pyramid of metal blocks. This includes iron, gold, diamond, emerald, or netherite. The pyramid can be as big as nine blocks connected on the ground, or you can make a massive pyramid. Either way, place the Beacon at the center of the pyramid to activate it in Minecraft.