Minecraft 1.19: How to craft and use a recovery compass

Minecraft players will have to wait just one more day for the highly anticipated 1.19 update. Mojang announced that The Wild Update would be available on all platforms (Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Series X, PlayStation 4 & 5, iOS, PC and Android) on June 7.

All of a sudden, that's tomorrow, though no release time has been specified. The afternoon (EST) slot is likely, as that's when the 1.18 update went live.

There are a lot of great features coming into the game. The Mangrove Swamp biome will add new trees and mud blocks, which will be a stellar building block. Frogs, Allays and other mobs will also be added.

The Deep Dark might be the biggest feature, due to it having the Warden and Sculk blocks. One often overlooked feature that's coming in the Deep Dark is Ancient Cities, which will have echo shards in their loot.

Echo shards are used to make a recovery compass. Here's how to make one and use it properly in the Minecraft 1.19 version.

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Making and using a recovery compass in Minecraft 1.19

The recipe for a recovery compass is simple enough: eight echo shards and a compass. A compass is crafted with four iron ingots and one redstone dust.

Echo shards are the only challenging part of the recipe. They can only spawn in Ancient Cities, which can only be found in the Deep Dark biome. This happens to be the only place where the Warden spawns.

Crafting recipe for the new compass (Image via Mojang)

One can begin to see how collecting these echo shards might be a serious challenge, but it's the only way to get a recovery compass. These figure to become one of the most useful items in Minecraft once they are officially added.

Unfortunately, even finding an Ancient City, which is a challenge in and of itself, doesn't guarantee an echo shard. In fact, even the chests in Ancient Cities have a fairly low chance of having echo shards.

In both Java Edition and Bedrock Edition, Ancient City chests have a 29.8% chance of having up to three echo shards. If players are lucky, they'll find three chests and have enough echo shards, but that's not very likely.

What is very likely is that Minecraft gamers will have to visit several Ancient Cities. That's also going to be a challenge because every Deep Dark biome, which isn't exactly a common one, won't have a city.

They can be located with the /locate command, but that's the only way to find them without struggling.

Once players have enough shards and have crafted the compass, they can use it to find out exactly why so many are excited about its arrival. A compass points one to spawn.

If players use a lodestone, it will point them to that lodestone. A recovery compass doesn't care about spawn, it actually cares about death.

Recovery compasses will point players in the direction of their most recent death. This item is perfect for finding lost items.

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