Brewing

Brewing is a fun way to make potions. Potions help you endure tough fights, survive in dangerous areas, and even damage some of your enemies. You can’t brew early in the game because you need a number of tricky ingredients to get anywhere with this art. We’ll tell you what to do!

Collect Ingredients to Make a Brewing Stand

The first step is to gather the primary ingredients you need. Nether Wart and Blaze Rods are two of the toughest (and most important) things on the list, so let’s focus on these.

Both materials are found in the Nether. Make a Nether Portal and bring ample supplies through to the other side. Search for a Nether Fortress until you find one, and then scour the place for Chests and for stairways with Soul Sand nearby. These are the only two places in the game where Nether Wart is available. Not all of the Chests have Nether Wart, and not all Nether Fortresses have the stair gardens. So it’s luck of the draw for finding these items.

Blazes, on the other hand, are found frequently in Nether Fortresses. Fight them with ranged attacks, or retreat to draw them forward. Kill as many as you can to get Blaze Rods.

Once you have a few of these goodies, make a Nether Wart garden. You don’t want to search Nether Fortresses every time you need more Nether Wart, so don’t do any brewing just yet. Wait until you have an adequate Nether Wart garden.

Sadly, you can’t use Bone Meal to speed up your garden; getting a large garden going is a fairly time-intensive process, but it’s well worth your investment. Break all of your initial Nether Wart into Seeds, and plant all of them. Do the same thing with the yields from your initial planting, and continue to increase the garden from there, taking only one or two Nether Wart at first to play with, and then more as your garden reaches a substantial size.

Now craft a Brewing Stand, a Cauldron, and some Glass Bottles. Fill your Cauldron with Water. This is useful for filling Water Bottles, and they look cool in your brewing area anyway. Having an infinite Water source nearby isn’t a bad thing, either.

Place all of your crafted items in one room with a Chest or two, and grab your Nether Wart. With these and a number of other odds and ends, you’re ready to start brewing.

Types of Potions

Potions come in two stages. You make the first stage by interacting with the Brewing Stand and adding a Water Bottle with some ingredients. After adding your ingredients, wait for the brewing to finish, and collect your finished potion.

There are five basic potions, as follows:

Base Potions

So far, it doesn’t look like brewing is very useful. You can make a potion that reduces your own melee damage—yay? But trust us, this gets much better.

After you have a primary potion, use the Brewing Stand again. This time, you add one of the primary potions instead of a Water Bottle. Now you start having fun!

Secondary Potions

Now you start to see a lot of possibilities. Potions of Healing let you restore health instantly, unlike food. Fire Resistance is useful when you fight Blazes and Ghasts in the Nether. Regeneration is critical to your survival in boss fights, against Withers or the Ender Dragon.

Nether Wart and a few key ingredients allow you to make extremely useful potions, and you can brew even more powerful versions if you’re willing to spend a bit more time and effort. Read on!

Tertiary Potions

There are a few simple ways to remember how the potion system works. Everything starts with Nether Wart. Your initial potion should almost always be made by adding Nether Wart to a Water Bottle. Done.

For tier-two potions, use your Awkward Potion from the first stage and add an ingredient to get whatever base effect you need. Look on the Secondary Potion table to figure out what you need/want.

To make potions last longer, add Redstone to a Secondary Potion.

To make potions stronger, add Glowstone Dust to a Secondary Potion.

To make potions work when thrown, use Gunpowder.

Gunpowder turns normal potions into Splash Potions. This makes Potions of Weakness and Potions of Poison useful against specific enemies. Potions of Poison II really add damage over time.

People often brew Splash Potions of Healing so they can heal themselves as quickly as possible. Tossing the potion onto the ground at your feet gives you health much faster than just about any other option. It’s way faster than food and considerably faster than drinking a Potion of Healing in a normal way.