Guide: How To Make Infinite Lava In Minecraft

Featured image credit: Mojang

Normally, 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 has an orange color and can be used for things like burning enemies or creating 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 walk you through 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.

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 go exploring 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 own 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 edges of the pool as well.

Now lava particles will start to slowly drip into the cauldron, 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 it takes around 18-20 minutes for a cauldron to fill.

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’s always going to be a lake of lava. This lake of lava below the Nether is going to be your infinite lava source and there’s enough to fill a ton of buckets.

You simply 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 need to place cobblestone blocks to build a type of scaffolding that can guide you to the lava lake. Remember not to bring rare items with you 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 just need to collect the lava using an empty bucket whenever you need it. That way you’ll quickly have a number of 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 so that they could use lava as they would other renewable resources. The infinite lava blocks could be instantly broken to create your own 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. 

It’s still possible to make a lava pool in your game, 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 creators of the game thought that 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, then 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 that 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.

Having to use 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?

The use of lava is a way to achieve many essential things in Minecraft.

It’s possible to use lava in mischievous ways, but you might be more concerned with the practical uses.

Thankfully, lava is considered to be 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 a the dark purple kind of 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 useful resource in the game. It makes sense that you would want a reliable source of lava.

In Closing

You’ve learned how you can get a reliable source of lava in Minecraft. The old method of making infinite lava no longer works in the vanilla version of the game.

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

If you’re someone who plays 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 just need to use cobblestone to build a scaffolding that goes down to the lava lake.

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