How to make a bucket in Minecraft

One tool in Minecraft that is surprisingly versatile in its utility is the bucket. From a glance, newcomers might see the bucket as nothing more than a container for transporting water in your inventory. While such an assumption is not wrong, the use of buckets goes beyond carrying water, allowing players to hold liquids and entities they might not have guessed possible. For instance, buckets can hold cow milk, smoldering lava, cold snow, and even aquatic creatures like fish, axolotls, and tadpoles. 

Related: How to get a sponge in Minecraft

Crafting a bucket in Minecraft

In order to make a bucket in Minecraft, you will need to procure three iron ingots smelted from raw iron in a furnace. Raw iron is harvested from iron ore, a mineral that can be found in caves and mined using a pickaxe. Conversely, you can also discover iron ingots in the treasure chest of almost every structure across the overworld, Nether, and even The End. The structures with which you will most likely come across iron ingots are Shipwrecks and Buried Treasure. If you are lucky, you might find some in Village chests as well. Fortunately, iron ore blocks are easy to find, so you likely will not have any issue getting your hands on this metal resource. 

Once you have three bars of iron, place them on the 3 × 3 grid of a crafting table. To craft a bucket in Minecraft, have two of the ingots sit in the middle row on the left and right, with the third on the bottom row in the center. You can use a bucket by equipping it with your hand and interacting with the liquid or aquatic creature you wish to collect. Be careful while handling lava; even though it’s harmless in your inventory, pouring the molten magma too close to your character can result in injury. Moreover, remember that only tadpoles and fish can be placed into buckets, not frogs, dolphins, or Guardians.