How to Make a Bucket in Minecraft – Resource Guide (2022)

Any good D.I.Y. Minecraft project begins and ends with the tools at your disposal. Without the right equipment, you’ll never be able to create your scale replica of Bowser’s Castle or what have you. One of the most important tools in such an endeavor is the humble bucket.

After all, even in Minecraft, there are some things you can’t pick up with your hands. Here’s how to make a bucket in Minecraft.

How to Make a Bucket in Minecraft

The bucket is one of the simplest crafting recipes in Minecraft, and as soon as you’ve got some iron at your disposal, you should make one. As a reminder, after you harvest some iron ore underground with a pickaxe, you’ll need to smelt it into iron ingots in a furnace.

To make a bucket, you’ll need three iron ingots arranged in the following pattern:

What Can You Do With a Bucket?

So you’ve got a lovely new bucket at your disposal, now what do you do with it? Well, all sorts of things! The first and foremost usage of a bucket is to pick up liquid blocks like water or lava. You can do this by holding your bucket and right-clicking on the liquid. Obviously, you can’t grab liquids with your hands, so a bucket is necessary to transport them from place to place.

Any liquid you pick up with a bucket becomes what is known as a “source block.” When you place a source block on the ground, it’ll start producing more of itself. For instance, if you grab some water in your bucket and place it on a grassy spot, more water will flow outward from where you placed it. You can direct flows with solid blocks, though you might need additional source blocks if you’re making a long line of liquids.

Besides transporting liquids, a bucket can be used to harvest certain resources and pick up small animals. If you stand next to a cow or goat while holding a bucket and right-click them, you’ll get some milk, which you can use for cooking. If you fill a bucket with water and then right-click on a small sea creature like fish, tadpoles, or axolotls, you’ll collect them in the bucket and take them with you.

One particularly handy use for buckets is as fuel. If you fill up a bucket with lava and place it in the fuel slot of a furnace, it’ll power the furnace for much longer than individual pieces of coal or wood. The lava will be used up eventually, though, so remember to go fill the bucket back up periodically.

Remember to keep a handful of buckets in your inventory at any given time. You never know when you might need to scoop something up.