How to Make a Bed in Minecraft and What It Does

A bed needs 3 wool of the same color and 3 planks of any wood. Put the wool across the top row of a crafting table and the planks across the middle row, and you get one bed. It’s the most useful early-game item after your tools: sleeping skips the night and sets your respawn point.

Getting the wool

The wool is usually the hold-up on day one. Sheep give wool two ways:

• Kill a sheep: 1 wool. Three sheep for one bed.
• Shear a sheep: 1 to 3 wool, and the sheep grows it back after eating grass. Shears are 2 iron ingots, so this is the better method once you have iron.

Wool must match. Three white wool gives a white bed; mixing colors won’t work. White sheep are the most common, so most first beds are white. To get other colors, dye a sheep and shear it, dye the wool, or simply craft a finished bed with a dye to recolor it. If you want a steady supply of colored wool, see how to breed sheep.

You can also craft wool from 4 string, which is handy if you’ve killed a lot of spiders but haven’t found sheep.

What a bed does

Skips the night. Use the bed after sunset or during a thunderstorm and you sleep until morning. In multiplayer, enough players have to sleep at once (on Java, the players_sleeping_percentage game rule sets how many; it was playersSleepingPercentage before 1.21.11).

Sets your spawn point. Using a bed, even during the day, sets your respawn point there. If the bed is broken or blocked when you die, you’ll respawn at world spawn instead. Setting your spawn point has more on how this works.

Stops phantoms. Phantoms only spawn for players who haven’t slept in three in-game days. Sleep now and then and you’ll never see one.

Lets villagers breed. Each new villager needs a free bed. How to breed villagers explains the rule.

When you can’t sleep

You can only sleep at night or in a thunderstorm. You also need to be close to the bed, and no hostile mob can be within about 8 blocks horizontally and 5 vertically. That includes mobs inside walls or in a cave under your floor, which is why lighting up the area around your bed matters.

Beds in the Nether and End

Trying to sleep in the Nether or the End makes the bed explode. The blast is stronger than TNT and sets fire to things nearby, so never place a bed there by accident. Players turn this into a tool: bed explosions are the fastest way to mine for ancient debris, and some players use them to finish off the Ender Dragon.

Small tricks

• Landing on a bed bounces you and cuts fall damage roughly in half.
• Carry a spare bed when you explore. Placing it and sleeping on a long trip sets your spawn near where you are.
• Beds come in all 16 colors, so you can color-code them in a shared base.
• Since the Wilderness Bound drop (Java 26.3, Bedrock 26.50) there’s also a straw bed: 3 hay bales in a row make 4. It skips the night without moving your spawn point, but it breaks after one use and is destroyed if you try it in the Nether or End.