How to cure poison in Minecraft

Minecraft is a diverse sandbox video game with many different status effects that can be inflicted upon the player. Some examples of these negative status effects include poison, slowness, wither, blindness, nausea, darkness, and weakness.

However, the most common of these effects is the poison effect. This effect deals damage over time, with its rate depending on the potency of the poison. Poison is a lesser version of the wither effect and can only reduce a player to half a heart of health, whereas the wither effect can kill players. This article will discuss the effects of poison and how to cure this negative status effect.

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How to cure Minecraft's poison status effect

What is poison

Poison is a damage over time effect that certain mobs and entities can inflict on the player. All the poison effects that can be placed on the player by hostile means have a potency of one, meaning the damage is relatively low most of the time.

As these effects have a potency of one, the effect deals half a heart of damage for every 25 ticks, or around 0.4 hearts of damage every 0.8 seconds.

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What can inflict poison

A witch at their hut, one of the sources of the poison effect (Image via Minecraft)

The full list of ways the player can have poison applied to them is:

• Splash potions of poison thrown by witches (13 hearts on Bedrock, 18 damage on Java)
• Poisonous potato (two hearts of damage)
• Eaten pufferfish (24 hearts of damage)
• Contact pufferfish (one or two hearts of damage, depending on inflation level)
• Cave spiders (2.5 hearts or six hearts of damage, depending on difficulty level)
• Bees (four or seven hearts of damage, depending on difficulty level)

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How to cure poison

In Minecraft, there are two ways to cure the poison status effect. Both methods involve the player ingesting something to cancel out the effect. The first and oldest way to cure poison is by drinking a bucket of milk. This will get rid of any status effect the player is currently under, making milk Minecraft’s version of a cure-all.

The second, and much newer, method of getting rid of the poison status effect is by drinking honey from a bottle. This is a more specialized method of curing poison, as the honey will only remove the poison effect. However, unlike milk, honey will also restore some of the player’s hunger. It restores six hunger, or three hunger icons, worth of food.

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These are the only two ways to cure poison for any player outside of the Education Edition of the game. A third way to cure poison for players in the Minecraft Education Edition is by using an antidote, brewed with a bottle of water and the element silver. This is a reference to silver’s ability to detect poison in folklore and the element's anti-microbial properties.