Keeping up to date with your equipment and fighting intelligently will see you out of most trouble in Minecraft, but even the strongest Netherite gear isn’t going to protect you from the wrath of the game’s bosses. A foe like The Wither is incredibly powerful, and you’re going to need more than some armour to keep yourself alive.
To get that extra edge, you need to brew some potions. With alchemy, you can apply all sorts of useful effects onto yourself, and throw some harmful ones at your enemies. However, the problem with Minecraft’s open-ended system is the only way to work out what to use in-game is through trial and error. That’s why we’ve put together this guide for every potion recipe you need.
Brewing Stand & Awkward Potion
Before you brew anything, you need the right equipment, and in Minecraft, this is the Brewing Stand. For this, whether you’re playing on a server or single-player, a trip to The Nether is in order, as you need a Blaze Rod and any variant on Stone. Once you have your stand, you need to build up a healthy supply of Blaze Powder to fuel the thing.
Once that’s done, you can craft a Glass Bottle with three Glass and fill it with water from any source. Before it’s ready to become a potion, though, you need to brew it with Netherwart which you grow on Soul Sand. This will create the Awkward Potion, which is the base for all other potions.
Add your ingredients
Now the fun part starts, adding in the ingredients and seeing what effects come out. You can brew up to three potions with a single ingredient, just make sure you put three Awkward Potions in the relevant slots. Here is the effect that each item gives:
Sugar gives Speed.
Rabbit’s Foot gives Jump Boost.
Glistening Melon Slice gives Instant Health.
Spider Eye gives Poison.
Pufferfish gives Water Breathing.
Magma Cream gives Fire Resistance.
Golden Carrot gives Night Vision.
Blaze Powder gives Strength.
Ghast Tears gives Regeneration.
Turtle Shell gives Slowness & Resistance.
Phantom Membrane gives Slow Falling.
Finding/crafting most of these items is fairly simple. The most complicated is the Turtle Shell, crafted using five Scute, which only drops when a Baby Turtle grows into an adult.
Corrupted potions
Those effects aren’t the only possible potions though, as it is possible to brew one of those potions again, only this time to corrupt them. To corrupt a potion, you must brew it with a Fermented Spider Eye, which you get from crafting a Spider Eye with Suger and a Brown Mushroom.
These corrupted potions are perfect to throw at enemies, just be careful not to hit yourself with them. Here are all the corrupted effects:
Speed & Jump Boost become Slowness.
Instant Health & Poison become Instant Damage.
Night Vision becomes Invisibility.
Strength becomes Weakness.
Water Breathing, Fire Resistance, Regeneration, and Slow Falling can’t be corrupted.
Modifiers
The regular potions you get out of the Brewing Stand are good, but they could be better. If you want to take things to the next level, you’ll need to enhance each potion. To do this, you need to brew them again with different items and each will enhance or change the effect somehow.
Here is the full list of modifiers:
Redstone Dust extends the duration of the effect.
Glowstone Dust enhances the level of the effect, making it stronger.
Gunpowder turns it into a Splash Potion, which affects the area around where it is thrown.
Dragon’s Breath turns it into a Lingering Potion, which works like a Splash Potion, but the effect lingers for a while, affecting anything that steps in range.
Most of these ingredients are easy to get hold of, except for Dragon’s Breath, which you may not have even known existed as it sounds like an item from a Minecraft mod. To get this rare item, you need to fight the Ender Dragon. It has an attack where it breathes purple particles onto the floor, which hurts if you touch it. However, if you use an empty bottle on the particle effect, it will fill the bottle with Dragon’s Breath.
Written by Ryan Woodrow on behalf of GLHF.
