Minecraft Composter Recipe and Uses You Should Know

Food is as essential in Minecraft as it is in the real world. And if you want to survive long enough to get to the Ender Dragon and beat the game, you’ll need a lot of it. However, growing food in Minecraft can sometimes take ages, so it’s important to have a tool that will aid you along the way. That’s where a Minecraft composter comes in handy.

A composter in Minecraft helps you maintain a steady supply of food and crops, so it’s definitely a must-have in the game. Luckily, the crafting recipe for it is incredibly simple and only requires easy-to-obtain materials. In this guide, we tell you everything you need to know to craft this very useful block. Plus, we show you how to use a Minecraft composter and the best things you can compost in Minecraft PE.

Also read: How to Make a Mob Farm in Minecraft to Ramp Up Your XP

What is the Purpose of a Composter in Minecraft?

The composter in Minecraft does pretty much the same job as a real-life composter. These blocks take your excess plants, crops, and food items and turn them into a material called bone meal. You can use bone meal to fertilize your crops, allowing them to grow more quickly and thus yielding you more food.

Just like Minecraft smokers and a few other utility blocks, unclaimed Minecraft composters can also be used as job sites to turn unemployed villagers into farmers. They can also serve as an energy source for redstone comparators and as fuel in a furnace.

Minecraft Composter Recipe: Required Materials

The materials required to make a Minecraft composter are simple and easy to acquire. All you’ll need to acquire are seven slabs (any wood species in the game). You can use a combination of wooden slabs that you have available in your inventory to craft a composter in Minecraft.

If you don’t have wooden slabs yet, you can craft them using three matching wooden planks, which you can get by placing one log onto the crafting grid. Once you have your three matching wooden planks, simply launch the 3×3 crafting grid, and place them all in one row. Here’s an example:

Afterwards, you’ll see the six wooden slabs you’ve made in the output slot. Simply drag these slabs to your inventory.

Repeat the process once more so that you have seven wooden slabs.

How to Make a Composter in Minecraft

Now that you have your wooden slabs, it’s time to get crafting! Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can make a composter in Minecraft:

1. Select the crafting table in your hotbar.
2. Tap on the block where you want to place your crafting table.
3. View the interface of the crafting table by pressing the said utility block.
4. Select the wooden slabs in your inventory, and place them in a U shape in the crafting grid: three in the first column, three in the last column, and one in the remaining slot in the last row.

   

5. Drag the resulting composter from the output slot to your inventory.

Where to Find a Composter in Minecraft

Crafting a composter from scratch isn’t the only way to obtain this useful block. In Survival Mode, you can also find a composter in villages, particularly in farms. Once you come across one, you can mine them with practically any tool, but an axe does the job fastest. If there’s compost inside, note that all of those will disappear once you break the block, and you’ll be left only with the composter itself.

In Minecraft PE Creative Mode, you won’t need to do any exploring at all to obtain a composter. You can simply find one in your inventory, under Items.

How to Use a Minecraft Composter

Once you have your Minecraft composter ready, you can now use it to produce bone meal. Utilize a composter in Minecraft like a pro via this quick guide:

1. Navigate to the hotbar and access your composter.
2. Tap on the block where you want to place your composter.
3. Select the items you want to compost in your hotbar, and tap on the composter to add each item inside.
4. Keep adding items inside until you’ve built up seven compost layers. You’ll know you’ve successfully created a layer of compost when you see green particles right above the layer.
5. Once the composter is filled, you’ll see bone meal sitting on the top layer. Collect it by tapping on the composter.

   

Best Items to Compost in Minecraft

When using a composter in Minecraft, there are a few things you should take note of. The first is that while many plant and food items in Minecraft are compostable, some aren’t, so you shouldn’t place them inside the composter. The items you can’t compost in Minecraft are fish, meat, dead bushes, bamboo, and poisonous potatoes.

Another thing to keep in mind is that not all compostable items fill the composter at the same rate. Some items create a layer of compost faster than others, so they’re more efficient to use when making bone meal. Below, we show you all the items you can compost in Minecraft, grouped according to how quickly they can fill an entire composter. The higher the percentage, the less you’ll need of an item to create one compost layer.

Cakes and pumpkin pies are the best things you can compost in Minecraft since you’ll only need either one cake or one pumpkin pie to create a compost layer. That means you can fill the composter using just seven cakes and/or pumpkin pies. The other items are still useful for composting, but you’ll need several of each to build up a layer.

Final Thoughts

A composter is an incredibly useful item in Minecraft. It helps you produce bone meal, which in turn helps your crops grow a lot more quickly, yielding more food. It’s also one of the easiest tools you can craft in the game, so if you don’t have one yet, you should definitely get right to making one.

We hope our instructions and tips made crafting a composter in Minecraft a breeze for you. If you know someone who can use a bit of help from a Minecraft composter, feel free to share this guide with them!