You're standing by a riverbank, staring at those weird, grayish-blue blocks underwater. You need them. Your dream of a sleek, modern house with red brick accents depends entirely on those blobs. But here is the thing: if you think the only way to get clay is by diving into freezing water and swinging a shovel until your oxygen bar runs out, you’re doing it the hard way.
Honestly, the "traditional" way of gathering clay—scouring riverbeds and swamps—is kind of a pain. It's slow. It’s messy. It’s definitely not efficient if you're planning a massive build. While the game doesn't give you a "crafting recipe" for clay in the sense of putting two items in a 3x3 grid to pop out a clay block, there is a very specific renewable method introduced in the 1.19 Wild Update that changed everything.
Basically, you can grow it. Well, sort of.
The Secret to Renewable Clay: Why Mud is the Key
For over a decade, clay was a finite resource. Once you dug up all the clay in your immediate area, you had to trek further and further into the wilderness. It sucked. But Mojang finally gave us a way to manufacture it using the mud-to-clay pipeline.
To start this process, you need Mud. You find mud naturally in Mangrove Swamps, which are those messy, root-filled biomes that look like a nightmare to navigate. If you aren't lucky enough to find a Mangrove Swamp, don't worry. You can make mud yourself. Just take a glass bottle, fill it with water, and right-click on a block of Dirt, Coarse Dirt, or Rooted Dirt.
Boom. Mud.
Now, here is the trick. To turn that mud into clay, you need to dehydrate it. In the real world, you’d just leave it in the sun. In Minecraft, you need Pointed Dripstone. You place your Mud block directly on top of a solid block that has a Pointed Dripstone hanging underneath it. Over time—and it does take a bit of patience—the dripstone "drains" the moisture out of the mud. Eventually, the mud block transforms into a clay block.
It’s a slow burn. It’s not instant. But if you set up a row of twenty or thirty of these, you have a literal clay factory. No more diving. No more drowning. Just pure, industrial efficiency.
Hunting in the Wild: Where Clay Actually Hides
Sometimes you just need clay now. You don't have time to wait for dripstone to do its thing. If you're going for the classic exploration route, you need to know where the game’s RNG (Random Number Generation) likes to dump the most resources.
- Swamps are King. Lush, green, and full of lily pads. Swamps have massive patches of clay sitting just beneath the surface of the shallow water. Since the water is shallow, you don't even need a Respiration enchantment.
- Lush Caves. These are a goldmine. Since the 1.18 Caves & Cliffs update, Lush Caves have become the premier spot for clay. You’ll find it in huge deposits along the floor and walls, mixed in with moss and azalea roots.
- The Ocean Floor. This is the "old school" method. It’s everywhere, but it’s a hassle. Unless you have a Door (to create an air pocket) or a Potion of Water Breathing, it’s mostly a test of how fast you can click before you start taking drowning damage.
A quick tip from a veteran: use a shovel with Silk Touch. If you break a clay block with a regular shovel, it bursts into four clay balls. To get the block back, you have to craft them back together. If you use Silk Touch, the block stays whole. It saves you an immense amount of inventory space and time at the crafting table.
The Villager Shortcut (For the Lazy or Rich)
If you’ve spent any time mastering the Villager Trading system, you know that Emeralds are the real currency of the world. Why dig in the dirt when you can just buy what you need?
The Mason villager (the one with the Stonecutter workstation) is your best friend here. At the Novice level, Masons will actually buy clay balls from you for Emeralds. That’s not what we want. We want the clay.
Once you level up a Mason to the "Apprentice" or "Journeyman" level, they occasionally offer trades for blocks like Terracotta or Quartz. While they don't usually sell raw clay blocks, they are the primary way to get the products of clay without ever touching a shovel. If your goal was to make bricks, skip the clay entirely and just wait for a Mason to sell you Bricks or Polished Granite/Andesite variants. It’s a bit of a workaround, but in a late-game survival world, it’s much faster than farming mud.
The Math of Smelting: From Clay to Brick
Let’s talk about the actual "why." Most people want clay because they want Bricks.
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To get there, you take your clay balls (the things that drop when you dig up clay) and toss them into a furnace. One clay ball equals one brick item. You need four brick items to craft one Brick Block.
- Dig Clay.
- Smelt Clay Ball -> Brick.
- Craft 4 Bricks -> 1 Brick Block.
It is a resource-heavy process. This is why the Mud-to-Clay method is so revolutionary. It removes the "scarcity" factor from a block that used to be a luxury.
Common Myths and Mistakes
I’ve seen a lot of players try to "craft" clay using sand and dirt. Let’s be clear: that doesn't work. There is no vanilla recipe that lets you mix sand and dirt to get clay. That’s a feature in some popular modpacks (like SkyFactory), but in the base game, it’s a total myth.
Another mistake? Using a Fortune shovel.
People think "Fortune gives me more stuff, so I'll get more clay!" Nope. A clay block always drops four clay balls. Since it takes exactly four clay balls to make one block, Fortune does absolutely nothing for you here. Use Efficiency or Silk Touch. Don't waste the durability of your Fortune III shovel on clay patches.
Actionable Steps for Your Next Session
If you’re ready to start your brick empire, here is how you should actually spend your next hour in-game:
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- Find a Pointed Dripstone. Go to a Dripstone Cave. Grab as much as you can. It’s the literal engine of your clay farm.
- Craft Glass Bottles. You’ll need these to turn dirt into mud. Pro tip: fill them at a single infinite water source to save travel time.
- Set up a "Drying Station." Place your mud blocks on top of blocks (like glass or stone) with dripstone hanging beneath. Make it big. 50 blocks is a good start.
- Go Mining. While your mud is drying into clay, go do something else. Exploration or mining for coal (you'll need the fuel for smelting later) is the best use of that "wait time."
- Harvest with Silk Touch. Once the mud turns gray, it’s clay. Pop it off with a Silk Touch shovel and replace it with more mud immediately.
Clay isn't the rare, precious commodity it used to be back in 2012. Between the Lush Caves and the Mud-Dripstone mechanic, you have everything you need to build a literal city of bricks. Stop diving into the murky ocean water and start working with the mechanics the game actually gives you.