How does a beacon work in Minecraft

The beacon is an extremely powerful block in Minecraft that helps you receive various positive status effects in a particular area. Beacons are considered to be an endgame block, especially because of how difficult one of its crafting ingredients is to obtain. You will need to craft these blocks and place them on top of expensive earth mineral blocks for them to work properly.

Here is everything to know about beacons in Minecraft.

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All major details about beacons in Minecraft

How to craft and place a beacon

Beacon can be crafted using these blocks and items (Image via Mojang Studios)

A beacon can be crafted using three obsidian blocks, five glass blocks, and one nether star. The nether star is the hardest of these to acquire since it is only dropped by the Wither boss mob, which is one of the strongest and deadliest entities in the game. To defeat the Wither, you will need to have some of the best gear.

Once a beacon is crafted, it needs to be placed on top of either a block of iron, gold, diamond, emerald, or netherite. The type of earth mineral will not have any effect on what the beacon offers. Hence, you can choose to go with blocks of iron, as they are the easiest to craft.

All four pyramid levels on top of which beacons can be placed (Image via Mojang Studios)

The beacon should be placed on top of a pyramid structure made up of blocks of any earth mineral. The smallest pyramid can be of nine blocks in a 3x3 configuration, while the biggest one can be made up of 164 blocks, starting with a 9x9 base, then 7x7, 5x5, and finally 3x3 layers.

A picture of these pyramids is provided above. Each level of the pyramid will unlock more positive status effects.

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How does the beacon status effect work?

GUI of a beacon, showing which status effect unlocks at what level (Image via Mojang Studios)

After setting up a pyramid and placing the beacon on top of it, you can interact with the block to open its GUI. You will see which layer of the pyramid unlocks which status effect in a beacon. Here is a list of all the status effects that a beacon can apply:

• Layer 1 - Speed 1 - Increases movement speed.
• Layer 1 - Haste 1 - Increases mining and attack speed.
• Layer 2 - Resistance 1 - Decreases all incoming damage.
• Layer 2 - Jump Boost 1 - Increased jumping distance and height.
• Layer 3 - Strength 1 - Increased melee damage.
• Layer 4 - Regeneration 1 - Renerages health.
• Layer 4 - Any primary status effect (speed, haste, resistance, jump boost, or strength) to level 2.

If a beacon is placed on a four-layer pyramid, you will have a choice to select from these combinations:

• One level 1 primary effect with regeneration 1 effect.
• One level 2 primary effect with another level 1 primary effect.

When it comes to activating or changing the beacon configuration, you will need to feed the beacon with a single earth mineral ingot, like iron ingot, diamond, emerald, gold ingot, or netherite ingot. Using iron ingot is the best option since they are easily available. Every time you look to change the status effect configuration, you will have to feed the beacon an ingot.

After activation, these powerful blocks can offer some brilliant Minecraft status effects to any player for a certain time in a certain radius. Here is a list of each layer increasing the radius and the time of the status effect:

• Layer 1 - 20 blocks - 11 seconds
• Layer 2 - 30 blocks - 13 seconds
• Layer 3 - 40 blocks - 15 seconds
• Layer 4 - 50 blocks - 17 seconds

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