Bone meal is a craftable utility item in Minecraft that can be used for a lot of things. It can be crafted fairly easily from any bones and can even drop from mobs. In this article, we are going to showcase the top 5 best uses for bone meals in Minecraft.

1. Growing trees

This is probably the most commonly known feature of bone meals. Players can place this item on almost any plant or tree to boost their growth immediately. Keep in mind that Bone Meal fertilization has a chance to fail. Therefore, it might cost you more than one piece of bone meal to grow certain plants.

Minecraft Bonemeal
Bone meal's main purpose is for fertilizing plants, allowing them to grow much bigger than usual.

There are only a few plants that bone meal has no effect: Cactus, Vines, Nether wart, Chorus plants, and Sugar cane (Java Edition). Villagers with the farmer profession can collect bone meal from a full composter, with which they can make their crops grow faster.‌

2. Craft bone blocks

Bone meal can be assembled into bone blocks, which in turn can be used for decoration. The best part about using these blocks for decoration is that they have a circular pattern when turned on their side. This can look fairly good depending on the player's build, adding some much-needed variations to Minecraft.

Bone blocks can also be used to store and transport bone meals if you have a lot of them to spare.

2. Creating new plants

If bone meal is used on a grass block, tall grass, grass and flowers would begin to grow in the close vicinity. The flowers that appear are dependent on the biome - this means to obtain specific flowers, players need to go to the exact biome where they are naturally found.

Flower Plains
Players can grow whatever flower they want by just placing bone meal randomly.

This also affects other elements in other biomes such as nylium, netherrack and underwater blocks.

4. Banners

Players can use many different designs provided in the game to create their own custom banners. This is where bone meal comes into play. It can be used as a loom ingredient to decorate banners and is the only way to dye a banner lighter or white. They are also useful when players wish to remove a design from their banner.

5. Dye items

Bone meal is a source of dye in most editions of Minecraft. However, the dye mechanics are slightly different based on the version of the game.

  • In Bedrock, players can just apply bone meal directly to the item to dye them white.
  • In Java, it cannot be used directly. Players need to craft the bone meal into white dye first before applying it to items such as wool, beds or sheep.

By mixing bone meal with other colors or dyes, players can create dyes with new colors including gray, light blue, lime, magenta, and pink.

Minecraft Building How To Dye Chart 1 7
Bone meal is used for a lot of things in Minecraft's Dye chart.

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