Key Takeaway
To make a single block of Blue Ice, you’ll need to fill a Crafting Table with 9 blocks of Packed Ice. However, to make a single block of Packed Ice, you’ll need to combine 9 blocks of regular Ice on a Crafting Table. As such, to make just 1 block of Blue Ice, you’ll need 81 blocks of regular Ice.
Besides cool aesthetics, you can use Blue Ice blocks in Minecraft to travel very quickly. By far the fastest way to travel, sliding a Boat across Blue Ice can let you move at over 70 blocks per second!
Table Of Contents
The Crafting Recipe for Blue Ice Blocks
To make Blue Ice, you’ll need to completely fill all the slots of a Crafting Table with 9 blocks of Packed Ice. This recipe will give you 1 block of Blue Ice. If you need to make Packed Ice, you can combine 9 blocks of regular Ice in the same manner to get 1 block of Packed Ice.
As such, if you’re starting this crafting pursuit with regular Ice blocks, you’ll need 81 of them to make just a single block of Blue Ice. Since this ratio is pretty severe, it’s recommended to use Packed Ice in order to create tons of Blue Ice.
Note that Blue Ice cannot be converted back to Packed Ice. For this reason, Blue Ice cannot be used as a storage block for Packed Ice.
How to Mine Every Type of Ice Block
Normally, it’s impossible to mine Ice, Packed Ice, and Blue Ice in a conventional way. When you break Ice blocks with most tools, they won’t drop anything. The only way to harvest these frigid resources is with a Silk Touch Pickaxe. Breaking Ice blocks with such a tool will allow them to drop themselves.
Where to Find Blue Ice
You can find Blue Ice in Frozen Ocean biomes and in some Chests of Snowy Tundra Villages. Furthermore, Wandering Traders have about a 17% chance to have a trade option for Blue Ice. These nomadic merchants can potentially sell you 1 block of Blue Ice for 6 Emeralds.
Where to Find Packed Ice
Despite being able to spawn naturally, Blue Ice is still pretty rare. You’re better off using your Silk Touch Pickaxe to harvest a bunch of Packed Ice, as it’s much more common. You can find tons of the stuff (and regular Ice blocks) in cold places—particularly Frozen Oceans, Ice Spikes, and Frozen Peaks biomes.
How to Get the Silk Touch Enchantment
There are only a couple of ways to get the Silk Touch enchantment. Firstly, you can try and get lucky by enchanting a tool on an Enchanting Table. However, the odds of getting the Silk Touch enchantment this way are quite low.
A better method is to seek out (or create) Librarian Villagers. This kind of Villager can sell Enchanted Books. If you have enough Librarians, the odds of finding an Enchanted Book for sale are much better than trying to find it through enchanting.
To get the Silk Touch enchantment from an Enchanted Book onto a tool, you’ll need to use an Anvil. Simply place the desired tool in the left slot of an Anvil and then place the Silk Touch Enchanted Book into the middle slot. This will combine these items into a tool possessing the Silk Touch enchantment. Just keep in mind that the Enchanted Book will get consumed.
The Main Use for Blue Ice
Making a track of Blue Ice blocks can basically let you create a high-speed highway. Riding a Boat across Blue Ice can let you reach speeds of around 72 blocks per second. For perspective, the maximum sprinting speed is around 5.5 blocks per second. As such, you can travel over 10 times faster by using a Boat to slide across Blue Ice!
This will let you travel anywhere extremely quickly—faster than literally any other method. This is even considerably faster than flying in Creative Mode (which is about 10 blocks per second). For this reason, if you want the most efficient way to travel between different places in the same world, Blue Ice tracks are the best way to do so in both Survival Mode and Creative Mode.
Fun Facts About Blue Ice
Besides being super slippery, Blue Ice blocks also have some other properties that make them great for building. Here’s a breakdown of useful information regarding Blue Ice:
- Blue Ice blocks are completely solid, which means you can place other blocks on top of them
- Despite being made of Ice, Blue Ice does not melt when near sources of light
- You can use Blue Ice, Soul Soil, and flowing Lava to create a Basalt generator
- Unlike regular Ice (but like Packed Ice), Blue Ice is not transparent and will not let light pass through itself
