How to Make Terracotta in Minecraft, Dyed and Glazed

Smelt a clay block in a furnace and you get 1 terracotta. That’s the plain, orange-brown version. From there, surround 1 dye with 8 terracotta in a crafting table to make 8 colored terracotta, and smelt a colored block again to get patterned glazed terracotta.

Make sure you smelt the block, not the clay ball. A clay ball comes out of the furnace as a brick item, which is what you want for bricks but not here.

Getting clay blocks

Clay sits at the bottom of rivers, lakes, swamps and lush caves. Mine it with a shovel and it drops 4 clay balls; craft them back into a block. A Silk Touch shovel drops the block directly and saves the step. Our page on finding clay lists the most reliable spots.

Or mine it in the badlands

The badlands are made of terracotta. Layers of plain, white, orange, yellow, brown, red and light gray terracotta run through every hill. Bring a pickaxe (terracotta drops nothing without one) and you can collect thousands of blocks without touching a furnace. For the other nine colors you’ll still need dye.

Plain terracotta also shows up in some plains and desert village buildings.

Dyeing

Put 1 dye in the center of a crafting table and 8 terracotta around it. You get 8 terracotta of that color. Start from plain terracotta for clean results. Dye sources for every color are listed in our concrete guide, since both blocks use the same dyes.

Glazed terracotta

Smelt any colored terracotta and it turns into glazed terracotta: a shiny block with a pattern in that color. Each of the 16 colors has its own design, and the pattern rotates depending on which way you face when placing it. Put four in a 2x2 and rotate each one a quarter turn from the last, and many colors form a larger tile pattern. Experiment on a test floor first.

Glazed terracotta has a useful quirk: slime and honey blocks don’t stick to it. Pistons still push it, so redstone builders use it to stop a slime contraption from grabbing the blocks next to it.

Terracotta vs concrete

	Terracotta	Concrete
Look	Matte, muted, earthy	Smooth, bright, saturated
Blast resistance	4.2	1.8
Made from	Clay or found in badlands	Sand, gravel, dye and water
Patterned version	Glazed terracotta	None

Terracotta works well for rustic and desert builds, roofs and floors; concrete suits modern builds. Mixing them works too, since the colors sit close together. Find more building material guides on the guides hub.