How To Craft And Use TNT In Minecraft

TNT is an explosive block that can be primed to generate an explosion. It is a creative way to farm and beat powerful mobs in Minecraft with minimal effort. In this article, we are going to showcase how to craft and use TNT in Minecraft.

1. How to craft TNT in Minecraft

TNT blocks can be crafted using 5 blocks of Gunpowder and 4 blocks of sand or red sand. On the crafting table, place gunpowder as an X and fill the rest of the slots with sand blocks to create a TNT block.

How To Make Tnt In Minecraft — Crafting recipe for a TNT block in Minecraft.

Where to get gunpowder?

Gunpowder is actually pretty rare. They can only spawn in chests or mob drops and cannot be crafted. You can get them from the following mobs:

Creepers: drop 0-2 pieces of gunpowder upon death. Looting can increase this by one per level, with a maximum of 5 gunpowder.
Ghasts: drop 0-2 pieces of gunpowder upon death. Looting can increase this by one per level, with a maximum of 5 gunpowder.
Witches: drop 0-6 pieces of gunpowder upon death. Looting can increase this by three per level, with a maximum of 15 gunpowder.

Outside of drops, you can also get gunpowder from wandering traders (17% chance for 1 gunpowder), open desert temple chests or dungeon chests (60% chance for 1-8 gunpowder).

Witch In Minecraft — Witch mobs are pretty rare - they can be found in the swamp hut.

Where to get sand blocks?

Unlike gunpowder, sand is super common. You can find sand and red sand most commonly in Beaches, Deserts, Riverbanks and Mesa (red sand). Refer to this guideline on how to find biomes in Minecraft to easily locate those places.

2. How to use TNT in Minecraft

Overall, TNT blocks get activated by fire, Redstone or blasts from explosions. Below are the more common ways to trigger TNT in Minecraft.

Using a flint and steel or a fire charge
Hit with a powered Redstone current
Being shot by a flaming projectile
Being in the blast radius of a nearby explosion, including that of another TNT block, Wither skulls, a Creeper, a bed, a respawn anchor or an end crystal.

If activated by Redstone or fire, a TNT will explode after 4 seconds. If destroyed by another explosion, it explodes after 0.5 to 1.5 seconds. TNT has an explosion power of 4, lower than a bed.

Blowing up TNTs over long distances using redstone.

TNT traps

Generally speaking, TNT can be used in an endless variety of traps thats' only limited by your imagination. The simplest of them is the landmine, which consists of a TNT block connected to a pressure plate or tripwire with redstone. You can find traps like them generated naturally in the desert pyramids.

Mob farms

Players can use TNT to speed up mob farming. Mobs killed by player-ignited TNT (via flint and steel or by flaming arrows) counts as "killed by players" and drop experience orbs as normal.