Usually, you must make a Diamond Pickaxe before you can get Obsidian in Minecraft. However, you can bypass the need for a Diamond Pickaxe by using lava and water to make Obsidian. All you need is a Bucket.
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What You Need to Make Obsidian
Firstly, you will need a Bucket–ideally more than 1 if you want to be as efficient as possible. 2 Buckets should do for the simplest method. However, the most important component for making Obsidian blocks is a lava source block. This is the type of lava that you can scoop up with a Bucket, as opposed to flowing lava, which you can’t collect with a Bucket. Lastly, you’ll need a Water Bucket to cool the lava into Obsidian.
Just don’t forget that you can only collect Obsidian with a Diamond or Netherite Pickaxe. If you try to mine Obsidian Blocks with any other kind of Pickaxe, you can still break it, but it won’t drop itself as an item. Just keep in mind that you need to get flowing water to cover a source lava block to turn it into Obsidian. A source block of water dumped onto a source block of lava will make Cobblestone. Similarly, flowing water that touches flowing lava will also turn it into Cobblestone.
Steps for Making Obsidian Blocks
- Place 1 or more source blocks of lava
- Empty a Water Bucket nearby, but not on top of any lava source blocks
- After the flowing water turns the lava source blocks into Obsidian, collect the water source block in your Bucket
- Mine your Obsidian with a Diamond or Netherite Pickaxe to collect it
Making a Nether Portal With Lava and Water
If you don’t have a Diamond or Netherite Pickaxe and still want to use Obsidian to make a Nether Portal, you can. You just have to create each block with the steps mentioned above. Be sure to contain each source block of lava safely in Cobblestone before trying to pour flowing water over it. A Nether Portal needs to be 4 blocks long and 5 blocks high, however, you don’t need to have the corners. As such, you can make a Nether Portal with only 10 Obsidian.
Other Ways to Get Obsidian Without Mining
You have a small chance of finding Obsidian in the Weaponsmith’s Chests of Villages. In each of such Chests, you have a 25.6% chance to find 3 to 7 Obsidian blocks. There are other ways that you can get Obsidian without mining it, however, the rest will all take you into the Nether or the End. Out of these 2 dimensions, the Nether is the best place to gather Obsidian-making resources. Therefore, you will ironically need to make a Nether Portal out of a bunch of Obsidian if you want the best Obsidian farming method.
How to Get a Lot of Obsidian Quickly
The overworld does have lava here are there, though it is often found deep underground. Conversely, the Nether is full of lava–there are literal lakes of the stuff. As such, one of the quickest methods of getting a lot of lava is to bring a bunch of empty Buckets into the Nether, find the closest lava lake, and scoop up a bunch of the orange resource. Establishing an efficient route for this can allow you to ferry many Lava Buckets into your base on the safe side of your Nether Portal.
