How to make a Minecraft beacon

Creating your first Minecraft beacon or just looking into the possibility of how to craft this rare and valuable item? A beacon will set you back a pretty penny in resources and time, and there are a ton of materials you’ll need to obtain, which sadly won’t be as easy as sprinting around the world and mining a couple of blocks.

Crafting a Minecraft beacon is an incredibly lengthy process in one of the best PC games, but the rewards are worth it. You’ll be granted status effects such as speed, jump boost, haste, regeneration, resistance, and strength to yourself and nearby players. When you activate a beacon in the crafting game, it will emit a beam of light into the sky, which can be seen from far away, a flashy sign that you’re the new owner of this dazzling and sought-after item. Here’s the Minecraft beacon recipe, how to get all the items required to build a beacon, steps for setting them up, and the powers you can expect to wield once your beacon is up and running.

Minecraft beacon crafting

Here are the materials you need to craft a Minecraft beacon:

• 5x glass
• 1x Nether Star
• 3x obsidian blocks

Once you have all these ingredients, place the Nether Star in the middle of the crafting grid, the obsidian blocks on the bottom row, and glass in every other unfilled space.

Obtaining Minecraft glass

Glass is the least of your worries, you can usually find this in woodland mansions or create it by smelting sand in a Minecraft blast furnace. If you’re mining glass, use the silk touch enchantment using a Minecraft enchantment table – it’s fragile!

Obtaining a Minecraft Nether Star

There’s only one way to get the Nether Star in Minecraft, and it’s not easy. You’ll need to defeat Minecraft’s toughest boss, the Wither, Luckily, we’ve got a guide on how to spawn and kill the Minecraft Wither and how to create a Nether portal in Minecraft to get everything you need.

Obtaining obsidian in Minecraft

There are several ways to obtain obsidian in Minecraft. It generates naturally on the surface of The End, as part of end ship in end cities, in woodland mansions containing a diamond block, or in some underwater ravines and caves.

If you need to create obsidian, it forms when spring water flows into lava and can be mined at layer ten or lower. You can also mine a Nether portal in the Nether or Overworld.

How to make a beacon glow in Minecraft

Now you’ve crafted your beacon, it’s not as obvious as planting your new luxury item on the ground and hoping for the best. Your Minecraft beacon is a lot more demanding than that.

You’ll need to create a pyramid for your beacon to sit atop. This is the only way to activate your Minecraft beacon, and it’s still not as simple as plonking down some blocks. There are different levels of pyramids, and you’ll need to use either iron, gold, emerald, or diamond blocks to create it. Thankfully, it doesn’t matter which material you use or how you place these blocks, unless you’re going for a certain aesthetic.

You can place one pyramid to place multiple beacons, but each beacon demands a larger pyramid radius consisting of more blocks and resources to accommodate its extraordinary power.

Minecraft beacon powers

How do you go about selecting your beacon powers in Minecraft? Although you’ll have to reach certain levels to acquire Minecraft beacon powers, when you reach each level, you’ll be able to select a power in the beacon’s GUI.

To select one of the primary powers, you’ll have to feed your beacon, either an iron ingot, gold ingot, emerald, or diamond, to obtain the status effect. The five primary powers are:

• Speed I – increased movement speed.
• Haste I – increased mining and attack speed.
• Resistance – decrease nearly all incoming damage.
• Jump Boost – increased jumping height and distance.
• Strength I – increased melee damage.

If you reach pyramid level four, you can choose a secondary status effect, either regeneration or increasing the strength of your primary powers. Again, use the beacon GUI to do this.

Minecraft beacon colour

You can alter the shade of your beacon in Minecraft by placing a stained glass panel above the beacon’s light. To create a stained glass panel, place eight glass blocks in the crafting screen that surround a dye of the colour of your choice. The colour of the stained glass you place will determine the hue of the beacon’s light.

That’s how you make a Minecraft beacon glow, so be sure to take care of it, as if your pyramid takes damage, your beacon will no longer function, and you’ll be left statusless. Although it’s an easy fix, patch up your damaged blocks, you don’t want to risk the lights going out on your well-earned work.