Terracotta is one of the most notable building blocks in the entirety of Minecraft. It can be dyed any color you want and is fairly simple to acquire, if you know where to look. Below, you can see exactly how to get Terracotta in Minecraft and some of its uses.
Finding Terracotta in Minecraft
Unlike other blocks in the game, Terracotta can’t be crafted using a furnace or crafting table. Instead, you need to mine the blocks in a specific biome of Minecraft. Specifically, you need to head to the badlands biomes, which are also referred to as the mesa biomes. These biomes look like a vast canyon, complete with brown and orange blocks as far as the eye can see and large rock-like formations. The only plants you’ll find here are dead bushes and cactus, but you’ll also find a healthy serving of Terracotta.
There are technically three different versions of the badlands biomes, but you can find Terracotta in all three. Like any biome in Minecraft, the location of the badlands in your world is random. However, badlands biomes usually border deserts and mountains, but rarely appear near any water sources. If you’re playing on a creative world, you can use a console command to teleport directly to the biome. You can type in: “/locate biome badlands” and the game will churn out the coordinates of the nearest badlands biome. Then, use the teleport command with the coordinates and you’ll be right in the middle of the biome.
When you arrive in a badlands biome, you need to look past all the red sand that’s prevalent on the surface. Terracotta can also appear on the surface, but you’ll usually find it clumped together or underneath a layer or two of red sand. Terracotta can come in several different colors in the biome, including a brown that looks awfully similar to the sand. For the most part, Terracotta is darker in color than the sand and is smoother, so keep an eye out for that texture.
After finding some Terracotta, you can only add it to your inventory by mining it with a pickaxe. Using any other tool will not produce a Terracotta block. Any pickaxe will do the job, so you can have Terracotta at the start of your Minecraft journey if you happen to spawn near a badlands biome.
How to dye Terracotta a different color
If you’re looking to make a Terracotta block a specific color for your base, you can easily dye a Terracotta block. This requires the following crafting recipe:
- Place eight Terracotta blocks surrounding the middle box of a crafting table
- Place any color dye in the center of the crafting table
In this specific instance, I went with the green dye, which we covered how to make in a previous guide, but any color dye will do. Now, you can make unique structures in Minecraft with all sorts of differently colored Terracotta blocks, or you can just stick with the original colors.
