Let’s say you’re going through your first days in Minecraft, and you haven’t been able to build a bed. In that case, you probably had to dig a hole or build a shelter and wait the night out in the darkness.
Beds change this dynamic, but making one requires a bit of luck. If you place the bed on your shelter, you can interact with it to sleep. Doing so at night will wake you up during the daytime, effectively bypassing the storms and the mobs lurking at night.
Aside from sleeping, beds become your spawn point. If you die in the Overworld, you’ll respawn in the last bed where you slept. If there’s no bed, you’ll re-spawn in the realm’s starting location.
So, consider beds as the ultimate shelter, an essential tool every player should craft at the early stages of their exploration. Do you want to build one?
Making a Bed in Minecraft
Making a bed requires finding sheep for wool, which can be the most difficult part of the process. The second ingredient is planks of any wood type. Here’re the ingredients:
- 3 wool with matching colors
- 3 planks of any kind of wood
- Crafting Table block
To make a bed, interact with the crafting table, put the three wool at the top and the three planks in the middle. The bed will have the color of the wool you used.
Furthermore, you can combine the bed with a dye of any color to put a custom color on the block. The two items should be at the top left brackets.
Let me explain it in steps as if you were new to the game.
- First, use your first (or the ax, if you have one) to punch trees and get wood logs.
- To create planks, put a wood log in the crafting grid. It will give you four planks.
- You can access the basic crafting grid by opening your inventory. Alternatively, if you already have the Crafting Table, use that.
- You can then place four planks on the crafting grid to create the Crafting Table.
- Put the Crafting Table on your action bar, and then place the block anywhere in the world.
- Find a sheep in the Overworld and punch it to get wool.
- Combine the wool and the planks in the crafting table
- Put the bed on your action bar and place it in the world.
Sheep are the “random factor” in the recipe, but these mobs are easy to find. You can find groups of up to seven sheep in any grass block on the surface during the daytime and in the open. They won’t spawn in wooded badlands or snowy tundras, though.
How Do Beds Work in Minecraft?
There’re some rules and mechanics you need to understand before setting up your bed and using it.
First of all, you can place it with the regular place button and sleep with the use button. You can’t interact with the bed of another player, though.
Furthermore, some mobs, such as creepers, will prevent you from sleeping if they are nearby (about 8 blocks away). You’d have to kill nearby hostile and neutral mobs before being able to interact with the bed.
Similarly, sleeping outside (rather than in a shelter) leaves you open to mob attacks. Mobs won’t attack you as you sleep, though, rather, they are kind enough to wake you up gently, and after you wake up, they will attack you.
Speaking of mobs, beds nearby zombie villagers can speed up the cure of the zombie villager (a similar effect to iron bars).
In any case, you can sleep only at night or during thunderstorms, in which case game time skips to the daytime.
That said, you can only sleep in the Overworld. Sleeping in the End or the Nether dimensions will make the bed explode, and the explosion is stronger than TNT.
Similarly, you can’t use the bed if you’re poisoned, starving, or on fire. You’d need to take care of this status before using them.
Lastly, if you don’t sleep for 3 in-game days, phantoms will begin spawning. Each in-game day lasts for 20 minutes, whereas the day is about 13 minutes, and the night covers the remaining 7 minutes.
How to Set a Bed as a Spawn Point?
The other thing you can make with a bed is setting a spawn point. A spawn point is a location where you’ll go back when you die in the Overworld.
Using a bed during the daytime will set it as the spawn point, but you won’t sleep on it. You’ll see a “Respawn point set” to confirm the operation.
Also, you can replace and reorient the bed, but as long as it’s in the same location, it will remain as the re-spawn point.
Lastly, the bed must have at least two blocks of distance from the roof. Otherwise, it will be “obstructed” and, therefore, not serve as a re-spawn point.
