Where to find dried kelp in Minecraft 1.18 update

Kelp was first teased by Minecraft’s creator Notch in 2009, with him implying an interest in adding a seaweed block to the game. However, kelp would not see an actual addition until recently, i.e., 2018.

The 1.13 update brought a total overhaul of the game’s oceans, turning them from lifeless expanses of dirt and gravel filled only with squid to much more lively stretches of seagrass and kelp with schools of fish and dolphins.

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How to get and use dried kelp in Minecraft 1.18

What is kelp

The kelp forests often found in Minecraft's oceans (Image via Minecraft)

Kelp is a plant that generates underwater in nearly all underwater biomes. The only exceptions for biomes that kelp can spawn in are frozen, deep-frozen, and warm ocean biomes.

Each chunk in a valid spawning biome for kelp has a 1/18 chance to spawn a random patch of kelp during generation.

Kelp can be destroyed with any tool or with a user’s fist. Destroying a lower part of the kelp will also break any part of its stalk above the breaking point, meaning gamers can quickly harvest massive amounts of kelp by staying on the bottom of the ocean when harvesting.

One of the more niche yet advantageous abilities of kelp is that placing it can turn downward flowing water into water source blocks. This makes creating bubble elevators much easier. It can also be dried for use as fuel or food for players.

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How to dry kelp

Kelp being cooked on a campfire (Image via Minecraft)

Kelp can be dried in several different ways, all of which are fire-related. The most traditional method is simply by using a furnace, in which kelp can be dried just like any other item can be burned or smelted. Each piece of kelp dried and then removed from a furnace will give users 0.1 experience, or 6.4 experience per stack.

In addition to the furnace, they can also dry kelp with smokers and campfires. Smokers function almost identically to furnaces, but they can cook food twice as fast, meaning this is the better way to cook kelp.

While the slowest way to cook by far, campfires, at 30 seconds to the furnace’s ten or the smoker’s five, do not require any fuel, assuming they are lit. This makes them a potentially good way for gamers to cook kelp in the early game.

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Uses of dried kelp

Kelp in its dried block form (Image via Minecraft)

There are a few different uses for dried kelp in Minecraft. The simplest one is in a composter, where there is a 30% chance per dried kelp for the compost level to increase by one. Once full, the composter will give players a bone meal. However, this is also the least useful of dried kelp’s potential uses.

The slightly more helpful way to use dried kelp is as a food source. Each piece of dried kelp consumed by users will restore one hunger or half of a hunger icon. This will also give them 0.2 saturation on the Bedrock Edition or 0.6 saturation on Java. They can eat dried kelp twice as fast as any other food.

The final and most useful way for gamers to take advantage of dried kelp is by crafting it into dried kelp blocks. These blocks can then be used as a fuel source, smelting 20 items per dried kelp block.

This makes it 2.5 times better than coal or charcoal as a fuel source, but only 0.25 as good a fuel source as a block of coal. However, the advantage of this as a fuel is that it is renewable.