How to Make a Water Bottle in Minecraft and Use It

Hold an empty glass bottle and use it on a water source block. It fills instantly and becomes a water bottle. You can also fill it from a cauldron with water in it. There’s no crafting recipe, so this is the only way to make one, and it works the same on Java and Bedrock.

If you don’t have bottles yet, three glass make three: see how to make a glass bottle.

Where to fill it

• Any water source. A lake, river, ocean or a single block of water you placed with a bucket. The water isn’t used up, so one source in your brewing room is enough forever.
• A cauldron. Each bottle takes one of the cauldron’s three water levels. It’s handy indoors or in the Nether, where you can’t place water from a bucket but you can fill a cauldron. Dispensers can’t fill bottles from a cauldron, though.
• A dispenser facing water. A dispenser with empty bottles in it fills them when it fires into a water source. That’s the start of an automatic brewing setup.

You’ll also come across ready-made water bottles: they’re one of the junk catches when fishing, and piglins occasionally barter one for gold. Wandering traders sometimes buy them for an emerald.

What water bottles are for

Brewing

Every potion starts as a water bottle. Put up to three in the bottom slots of a brewing stand, add nether wart, and you get awkward potions, the base for almost everything else. A few other ingredients go straight into water bottles:

• fermented spider eye makes a potion of Weakness
• glowstone dust makes a thick potion
• redstone, sugar, spider eye and several other ingredients make a mundane potion

Thick and mundane potions are dead ends, so don’t waste ingredients on them by accident. The full chart is in our potion brewing guide.

Making mud

Use a water bottle on dirt, coarse dirt or rooted dirt and it turns into mud, giving you the empty bottle back. Mud makes packed mud and mud bricks, and mud dripping through pointed dripstone is the way to make renewable clay. One bottle, one mud block, and you can refill the same bottle as often as you like.

Filling a cauldron

Each water bottle adds one level to a cauldron, so three fill it. You’ll rarely need this, since a bucket fills a cauldron in one go.

Drinking

Drinking one does nothing. It doesn’t fill hunger, cure effects or put out fire on you. You get the glass bottle back.

Splash and lingering water bottles

Brew a water bottle with gunpowder and it becomes a splash water bottle you can throw. It’s more useful than it sounds:

• It puts out fire in the block it hits and the four blocks around it, and extinguishes burning mobs and players.
• It puts out campfires and candles.
• It deals a small amount of damage to endermen, blazes, striders and snow golems, which take damage from water.
• It gives an axolotl stranded on land 90 seconds of air.

Splash water bottles don’t make mud, and the bottle is gone after you throw it.

Add dragon’s breath to a splash water bottle and you get a lingering water bottle. On Java it leaves no cloud. On Bedrock it leaves a cloud that puts out burning mobs that walk into it.