Minecraft Clay Farming Guide – How to Turn Mud Into Clay

Minecraft Clay Farming Guide - How to Turn Mud Into Clay

The new Minecraft Wild Update is live! While some are complaining about the lack of new features, fans of building structures with clay got some very good news. Clay has finally been made into a renewable resource! No more venturing further and further away from your base to mine clay from underneath shallow waters. In this guide, we’ll explain exactly how to set up a renewable clay farming system by turning mud into clay using some helpful tools from dripstone caves.

You May Also Like:

How to Turn Mud Into Clay

Before we get started, you obviously need mud to turn into clay. That’s another new item in the Wild Update which you can make by using a water bottle on a block of dirt. As in a water bottle for potion brewing, yes. While your gut might think a bucket would be more appropriate, try as you might, it will never turn dirt into mud.

We recommend crafting at least nine water bottles to fill your bar with. Just toss three pieces of glass into crafting table organized in a small V shape and you will get three bottles in return. Take these bottles and fill them with water either using a cauldron or any water source block.

Now that you’ve got the needed supplies, place down or find some dirt you don’t mind losing and use all nine water bottles on nine different dirt blocks. Doing so turns them into mud which you can then mine using a shovel. We’re going to need these once we get to our location.

For what it’s worth, you can also mine mud from the new Mangrove Swamp biome as mud generates instead of dirt here, all the way down to the stone layer underneath. Finding one is a much harder ask than just crafting some supplies, however.

The next step is easily the hardest if you’re just starting out. We need to find a dripstone caves biome. There’s no tried and true way of quickly locating one of these, but we recommend searching inland. They tend to spawn underground away from ocean and coast biomes.

Once you’ve found a dripstone cave, we need to utilize the various stalactites hanging from the ceiling. Make your way over to those and mine the block above the blocks that the dripstone is hanging from like in the picture above. Replace that block with mud and simply wait. After about 15 or so minutes, the mud will have been completely drained of its water and will turn into clay, ready to be harvested.

Note that dripstone directly attached to mud does not work. There must be one block separating the stalactite from the mud.

Clay Farming in Minecraft

Want to take this operation on the road? Harvest those pieces of dripstone by destroying the block and bring them home. Be careful to set up some blocks below you to catch them, especially if your cave is particularly dangerous with lots of steep drops. You can then bring them home, set up a room as large as you want and let have a bunch of clay waiting for you the next time it’s needed.

Now you can easily set up a clay farm at your home base that requires minimal effort on your behalf! It’s not completely automated, but it’s much easier than roaming the overworld hoping to stumble upon some and then spending a handful of minutes mining underwater. Gather dirt, quickly turn it into mud, then just place all the mud on top of your farm, and go about your day! If you want to optimize even further, set up a dispenser to automate the process though we’re no experts in Redstone, so we’ll leave that to folks more knowledgeable than us. Once we get details on how to do so, we’ll update this guide with a process as automated as it can possibly be. Minecraft clay farming is super easy and accessible to even the most casual players!

Author: Deann Hawkins