Guide: How To Make Infinite Lava In Minecraft

Featured image credit: Mojang

Usually, you want to avoid lava blocks in Minecraft since they can kill you, but there are certain creative uses for it.

Normal lava in Minecraft is orange and can be used to burn enemies or create obsidian.

Therefore, having an infinite lava source at your disposal to get things cooking on the furnace or for building traps is handy.

In this guide, I’ll teach you how to make infinite lava in Minecraft.

This will ensure complete freedom with lava in the game.

Below you can see two different ways you can still create an infinite amount of lava. These methods work in both Java Edition and Bedrock Edition.

Be careful when you play with lava and fire in Minecraft. Check out How to Put Out a Campfire in Minecraft.

1. Create a lava farm using a dripstone block

Lava farming is a great way to obtain large quantities of lava.

You can use a pointed dripstone to create an infinite lava farm.

Pointed dripstones spawn in dripstone caves in Minecraft, and you might have to explore a bit to find some.

It doesn’t matter if you use stalactites (hangs from the ceiling and point down) or stalagmites (grow on the ground and point upwards).

Just smash a dripstone and pick it up. But be careful it doesn’t fall on your head, or you fall on a stalagmite from a great height because it will call damage.

How to create the lava farm in Minecraft

So let’s look at how you can create your lava farm in Minecraft.

If you want, you can create bigger pools of lava and place dripstones below them to fill several cauldrons at once.

For this to work, you need:

• a dripstone
• cobblestones
• a bucket of lava
• a cauldron

Now follow these steps:

1. Create a small pool using cobblestones to contain the lava.
2. Place one (or more) dripstones below the floor of the pool
3. Place one (or more) cauldrons below the dripstones
4. Fill the pool with lava from your bucket.

If you’ve created a big pool, you’ll have to fill it using more buckets of lava to get lava dripping from the dripstones near the pool’s edges.

Now lava particles will start to drip into the cauldron slowly, and you can use a bucket to transfer the lava elsewhere once it’s full.

Voila, you’ve created your very own lava fabricator. You can easily repeat the process and create bigger lava farms like this:

The process is slow and takes 18-20 minutes for a cauldron to fill.

Tip: If you want more drops every time you mine or harvest something, use the Fortune enchantment.

2. You Can Use Nether Portals to Obtain Infinite Lava

The easiest solution to this problem is to use nether portals to make infinite lava.

The first thing that you must do is construct a portal to the nether.

At the Nether’s sea level, there will always be a lava lake. This lake of lava below the Nether will be your infinite lava source, and there’s enough to fill many buckets.

You need to place the nether portal in a safe location.

Next, you want to gather a huge amount of cobblestone that you can use to build a safe path down to the pool of lava.

You must place cobblestone blocks to build scaffolding to guide you to the lava lake. Remember not to bring rare items because you might make a mistake and fall into the lava.

Simply bring an iron pickaxe and the cobblestone that you need. The cobblestone will help you dam up certain spots to protect from ghast attacks.

Eventually, you’ll build a safe path to the lava source.

With this done, you’ll need to collect the lava using an empty bucket whenever needed. That way, you’ll quickly have some lava buckets at your disposal.

Is it Possible to Make Infinite Lava in the current version of Minecraft?

In the classic version of Minecraft, it was possible to make infinite lava from a lava block.

That was because the lava block acted like the infinite water sources in Minecraft in that it would repeatedly create lava.

As such, each block of lava acted like an infinite lava source block.

This allowed players to easily make a lava pool to use lava as they would other renewable resources. The infinite lava blocks could be instantly broken to create your infinite source of lava.

However, things changed in the vanilla version of Minecraft that exists today. It’s a lot harder to make infinite lava as things stand. 

Making a lava pool in your game is still possible, but it isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. In the past, you could make a magic lava bucket.

This was removed from the game for several reasons.

Having lava available in the game so readily made it too easy to cover large swaths of the map with lava.

Basically, the game’s creators thought it was too easy to misuse lava in the game. You could acquire as much lava as you wanted to and use it to do things such as destroy buildings.

This isn’t necessarily in the spirit of the game, and that’s why they removed it.

So what can you do to get around not being able to make infinite lava in the old way using infinite lava buckets?

The Old Method (No Longer Works in Vanilla Minecraft)

You might still be curious about what the old infinite lava method was like. This way of procuring lava won’t work in the game today, but it will work in older builds of the game.

If you can use a version of the game known as 1.9 pre-release 5, you can use the old bucket method. This requires just four buckets of lava to create an infinite source of lava.

Just dig a small cross shape into the ground and empty the lava into the four spaces you created. The center block of the cross will keep things forming and create an infinite lava source.

You can fill up your lava buckets as necessary using this simple method. Just be sure to fill your bucket from the center block, and everything will work just fine. 

With how easy this is to do, it’s easy to understand why the developers would change things. It made lava easier to obtain than it likely should be.

Using the nether portal to get lava now isn’t nearly as simple, but it’s still convenient enough. At least you know how things worked in the old days, even if the method doesn’t help you much now.

Why Is Lava Useful?

Using lava is a way to achieve many essential things in Minecraft.

Using lava in mischievous ways is possible, but you might be more concerned with the practical uses.

Thankfully, lava is considered the best fuel source in the game.

You can use one bucket of lava to provide fuel to a furnace. This will make it easy to smelt ore or to cook food for survival purposes. One lava bucket allows a furnace to burn for 1,000 seconds in the game. It’s the best fuel that you can find.

You can also use lava to build lava traps. This use of lave will help protect your home base. If you like making traps and being tricky, then this is a great use for lava that will help you out in survival mode.

Of course, you can also use lava to create obsidian. Obsidian is a dark purple block that forms when water flows over lava.

Obsidian is used for creating things like the Nether portal, beacons, and enchanting tables.

As you can see, lava is a valuable resource in the game. It makes sense that you would want a reliable source of lava.

In Closing

So that’s it. Now you know how to get a reliable lava source in Minecraft. The old method of making infinite lava no longer works in the game’s vanilla version.

You can play older builds of Minecraft and experience this old infinite lava method, though.

If you play the normal current build of the game, then using a nether portal to reach the lava lake below is the best option.

This isn’t hard to do at all. You need to use cobblestone to build scaffolding down to the lava lake.

Using blocks strategically, You can create a safe path while protecting yourself from attacks. Enjoy your new source of lava.