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What is copper used for in Minecraft?

A solid resource.

Copper is a common resource that you can find in Minecraft. The ore that you mine has a distinct orange and green coloring to it, and you can find it on any level in the game. It has a chance of spawning on levels 47 and 48, so if you’re hard-pressed to locate it, you want to dig down to these levels and mining around. Once you have the resource, there are several things you can do with it once you turn it into a copper ingot.

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When you smelt down your copper ore into copper ingots, there are a handful of useful items you can make with it. These are all of the items you can craft.

  • A block of Copper
  • A lightning rod
  • A Spyglass

The block of copper is a standard block that you can use as all of the other blocks. The limits are only your imagination, and you can create an entire house or castle out of it if you want to go down that route. However, over time, a block of copper oxidizes, slowly shifting from rich orange to a rough blue color. To turn it back into its starting orange color, you need to wax it using a honeycomb and then hit it with an ax or a well-placed strike of lightning.

The lightning rod is an item that redirects any lightning bolt that comes down near it. You want to place lightning rods near any location that you don’t want to be harmed by lightning, especially if it’s flammable.

The final item is a spyglass. You can use it to view things that are far away from you, making it easy to travel long distances and find out if you’re on the right path or not.

These are all of the items that you can expect in the first part of Minecraft’s Caves and Cliff update. The second part of the update is expected to drop in the future. It could mean more items will be added to Minecraft that you can use with copper, but we’re not quite sure. We’ll be updating this guide when we learn more.


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Author
Image of Zack Palm
Zack Palm
Zack Palm is the Senior Writer of Gamepur and has spent over five years covering video games, and earned a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Oregon State University. He spends his free time biking, running tabletop campaigns, and listening to heavy metal. His primary game beats are Pokémon Go, Destiny 2, Final Fantasy XIV, and any newly released title, and he finds it difficult to pull away from any Star Wars game.