Minecraft: Here’s How To Make Podzol

Podzol is not something your mind goes to straight away if someone were to ask you what’s the first type of block you see in Minecraft but quite often, you’ll come across the soil type. You might not even know that you’re walking on podzol when you first encounter it and try to mine it. Having said that, let’s see how do you find and make podzol in Minecraft?

How do you get podzol in Minecraft?

Apart from mining it with a tool enchanted with silk touch, you can also obtain podzol in its true form by finding Endermen. You’d have to get lucky and have the Enderman carry the podzol block in the Overworld and in the biome where podzol is naturally occurring. Then, you’d have to kill the Enderman which isn’t an easy task if you’re first encountering them so follow these steps to obtain podzol from Endermen:

1. Find an old-growth taiga or a bamboo jungle biome
2. To make sure you’re in the biomes, open up the debug screen which will tell you exactly what biome you’re in
3. Find an Enderman carrying a Podzol block
4. Make a 3×3 platform that’s 3 blocks high.
5. Provoke the Enderman by looking at it or damaging it. Then, run below the platform.
6. You can now kill the Enderman without risking getting killed yourself.

There are 2 reasons why this method of obtaining podzol is highly inefficient. One is that Endermen, although they appear in the overworld, isn’t exactly often seen there so you’d have to try hard to obtain it. Another is that it’ll take you too long to obtain enough podzol and you might even die in the process of trying to kill the Endermen even though the method I talked about is foolproof, mistakes can occur.

Another way of obtaining podzol is by trading with wandering traders. They’ll trade 3 podzol for 3 emeralds but this method of obtaining it is also highly inefficient. Firstly, you have to find the wandering trader, the podzol is expensive, and there’s only a 1/6 chance that the wandering trader will even offer it as part of its trades.

To conclude, the best way to get podzol is to enchant a shovel with silk touch, find the 2 biomes podzol can occur naturally in, and mine it, but there might be an even better way to obtain it.

What tree makes podzol?

The only tree that can make podzol is spruce wood. The reason for this might be that spruce is naturally occurring in the old-growth taiga biomes that feature podzol. If you can’t find the biome but have a few spruce saplings on hand, you can easily make podzol. Keep in mind that to generate a lot of it, you will need a lot of spruce saplings. Let’s get into how you can make podzol but first cover how you can get spruce saplings and moss blocks which are required for you to make podzol.

Spruce Saplings

To get spruce saplings, you must first locate one of the following biomes: taiga, windswept forest, snowy plains, snowy taiga, and old-growth taiga. I suggest mining the wood and leaving nothing but leaves. Once you’ve done that, start mining the leaves and the leaves should drop saplings. This will be a tedious process but you can plant a sapling and keep on mining the trees to not destroy the forest completely.

Moss

You can obtain moss blocks by going into lush caves or trading with villagers. Keep in mind that it is likely you only need one or two because you can bone meal the moss and have it spread on other blocks. The blocks it can typically spread to include stone, vines, and dirt if you bonemeal it and they’re surrounding it.

How to make podzol: step-by-step guide

Now that I’ve covered how to obtain moss and spruce saplings, let’s see how you can make podzol with the two by following these steps:

1. Create a 2-block-high area of stone. You can create stone from cobblestone by smelting it in a furnace.
2. The area can be as big as you’d like but I suggest making it at least 4×4.
3. Take out the center block of stone and place a moss block in it.
4. Bone meal the moss.
5. Clear out everything that has been generated on the moss but leave the moss clean.
6. Once done, cover a 2×2 area with spruce saplings
7. Start bone mealing one of the saplings
8. After some bonemealing, the moss and some surrounding blocks should turn into podzol.

If you then tried to bonemeal podzol to spread it, even more, you’d just be wasting bonemeal. podzol can’t spread with bonemeal. You can only find it naturally occurring in the specific biome, or you can make it using this method. You can repeat the process to create as much podzol as you’d like.

I’ve tested out making podzol with any sapling other than spruce and it doesn’t work. I’ve even tested out making it with only one block-high area with stone and it also doesn’t work. You can’t even place moss instead of stone to then bonemeal the spruce and create podzol. There has to be stone involved. We have a Redditor under the name of Pro6627 to thank for this revelation.

Terraforming with podzol

You can certainly terraform your world using podzol but podzol won’t terraform for you in the same way mycelium and grass blocks will. The simple explanation as to why is that podzol won’t spread naturally if you leave it to try and spread to dirt blocks in the same way mycelium and grass will.

Terraforming is the act of trying to make an area of land look more natural. It usually involves flattening the area first and then building from the ground up. If you’re feeling uninspired or are just bad with terraforming in general, you can use mycelium and grass to create the base shape of your hills and mountains for you.

With podzol, you can terraform unless you use the method shown that helps you create podzol if you’re really interested in terraforming with podzol. It’ll take a while and every bit of podzol you spread will have to be done by hand so it’s much simpler to just terraform with grass and mycelium, if you can find it.

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