- Create Wiki Page
- All Pages
In a Nutshell:
To make green dye, just smelt a cactus block inside a furnace. To do this, obtain a cactus from the desert biome and place it in the top cell in the furnace. Then, fill the lower cell with any block of fuel such as coal, wood, etc. Wait for the arrow in the middle to fill. Once the green dye has been made, simply click and drag it into your inventory.
There are a set of 16 different dyes available to you in Minecraft. They can be used for a multitude of uses. Most of the uses, if not all, are used for cosmetic effects. One of the dyes available is a green dye, one of the most difficult dyes to obtain as it cannot be found through flowers. You will have to harvest cacti and smelt it in order to obtain green dye. This guide will show you the required materials to make green dye, how to get/make green dye, and the uses you can expect out of green dye in Minecraft.
To read more about the other types of dye in Minecraft, click here.
To make green dye in Minecraft, you need 1 Cactus block, 1 Furnace, and fuel for the furnace (Coal, Wood, etc). In order to craft green dye, you will need to smelt a cactus in a furnace. Of course, to smelt in the first place you will need a furnace, and you will need fuel of some kind in order to cook the cactus. For the furnace, you will need 8 cobblestones, and for fuel, you can use coal, charcoal, any wooden item, or any plant item. Every cactus you smelt will yield one green dye for use. How many you want to make it up to you.
There are three methods of obtaining green dye in Minecraft. You can smelt it yourself with a furnace and cactus, you can trade with a wandering trader to get 3 green dye for 1 emerald, and you can find it in desert village house chests. Since trading with a wandering trader and looting desert chests is more up to luck than anything else, we will focus on the most consistent option for farming green dye: smelting cactus.
Cacti will only spawn naturally in deserts, you can also find one cactus in the basement of igloos, but this is much rarer. Once you have one cactus and one sand block you can grow potentially infinite cactus, so look around a desert until you find the cactus that you need.
Make sure to hit the bottom-most block of the cactus. If you work from the top down, the cactus you break may fall into another block of cactus. Whenever a loose block comes into contact with cactus it will be destroyed.
While you are here in the desert, gather some sand to grow any extra cactus close to home. You can break sand with just your hand, but a shovel will make the process much faster.
If you do not have a furnace, you will need to craft one. Start by mining out some stone with a pickaxe. You will need 8 cobblestones in order to make a furnace.
Head to a crafting table and put cobblestone in every slot except for the middle-most slot.
After your furnace is done, place it down and fill in the bottom slot with the fuel of your choice.
Now that you have your furnace ready, just place a cactus in the topmost slot of your furnace to begin cooking your cactus into the green dye. Once the arrow fills up your green dye will be ready.
As a side note, place some sand where you would like a cactus garden to be. Place a cactus down on top of the sand to ensure that you always have a source of cactus growing nearby.
Remember that blocks cannot go adjacent to cactus blocks. Any block immediately adjacent to a cactus will cause the cactus to pop out. You can use this to your advantage by placing any block one space above and next to where the cactus grows. When the cactus grows, it will immediately break away as it is not able to be adjacent to another block. If you have a water source next to the cactus that flows into a hopper nearby, you can automate the growth and collection of your cactus production by placing a chest next to the hopper.
To automate green dye production, instead of the chest you can place a furnace next to the hopper collecting cactus blocks, and if it is pre-loaded with fuel, it will smelt the cactus and make green dye automatically.
That is all it takes to make green dye, as well as how to continuously supply your green dye in Minecraft.
You can use green dye to combine with different colors. You can make cyan or lime green dye this way. Use a blue dye and a green dye to make cyan.
You can also use green dye and white dye to make lime green dye. Since these recipes used two dyes to make a different color, the resulting dye will yield 2 of its respective color.
You can also dye certain blocks with any dye. Among these blocks are glass, carpet, terracotta, and shulker boxes. For the shulker box you just need to place the green dye and the shulker box in the same crafting menu. With glass and terracotta, you will need to surround a piece of dye with glass or terracotta. This is to ensure you do not need a staggering amount of dye for a creative build. Each time you complete this recipe it will yield 8 of the blocks you are dying.
You can also combine 4 sand and 4 gravel blocks together with the dye of your choice to get concrete powder of the respective color of dye. This recipe is not very picky, as long as there are 4 sand, 4 gravel, and 1 green dye in the crafting menu, it will yield 8 concrete powder.
You can also dye a firework star to change the base rocket recipe to yield a different color of explosion. Just place the firework star with the dye of your choice to have it fade with the color of dye you used.
That is every use of green dye in Minecraft.
Green dye is one of sixteen different colors of dye that you can make and use in Minecraft. These dyes all function similarly in terms of uses and applications.
(Items that are similar or function similarly to Green Dye)
Lime Dye, green dye is used to craft lime dye.
Cyan Dye, green dye is used to craft cyan dye.
Red Dye
Purple Dye
Light Gray Dye
Gray Dye
Pink Dye
Yellow Dye
Light Blue Dye
Magenta Dye
Orange Dye
Blue Dye
Brown Dye
Black Dye
White Dye
While there are the traditional uses for green dye like coloring wool or staining glass, there are many lesser known facts about the uses for dye. Green dye can be used to color a tamed pet’s collar, dye the text of the words of signs, change the color of leather armor, and much more.
There are many different uses of green dye in Minecraft. Like most dyes, you can dye a wolf’s collar or a cat’s collar to personalize your companions.
You can dye a bed to have green sheets rather than the color of the wool you used. In the Bedrock Edition, you can dye the color of the bed regardless of the color it was originally. In the Java edition of Minecraft, you will only be able to dye a white bed. Just place your bed and a green dye in a crafting menu (it has to be white in the Java edition) and you will have yourself a green bed. This interaction is the same with wool.
You can dye a sheep and have it grow green wool instead of the color it naturally spawned with. Just right-click on the sheep with the dye in hand to change its color. Any wool it grows from now on will also be green.
(List of potential uses for dyes, items that utilize green dye in a crafting recipe, or potential uses for green dye)
Craft Green Candle
Craft Green Terracotta
Craft Green Concrete
Dye a Bed
Dye a tamed cat or wolf’s collar
Craft a Green Firework Star
(Mention any significant changes throughout various updates in Minecraft)
Green dye was first introduced in 2011 during the 1.2 Beta update of the Java edition of Minecraft.
The texture of green dye had three different textures throughout its history in Minecraft. There is little difference between the three textures, but it has changed from its beta texture to its official release texture. This green dye was then changed again to be smoother in its final iteration.
(Mention significant differences in crafting, uses, or functions of green dye between the different versions of Minecraft, if any)
Specifically regarding dying beds, the Java edition of Minecraft requires a white bed, while the Bedrock edition does not.
You can save dye by using dye on sheep instead of its wool drop. The sheep will regrow the same color of wool that you used to dye it with.
You can grow sea pickles to make lime dye instead of crafting it with green and white dye. This can help if you are short on green dye.
A. You can also obtain green dye by looting desert village chests or trading with a wandering trader. Neither of these options is very consistent, but there are different ways to obtain green dye other than smelting cactus. Smelting cactus does happen to be the easiest option, so aim for looting deserts rather than a desert village or hoping the wandering trader offers the green dye.
A. You can either combine white dye with green dye to make lime green dye, or you can place a sea pickle in your furnace. Much like smelting cactus, smelting a sea pickle will yield one lime green dye. Since you can bone meal sea pickles, it should not be too difficult to obtain a sea pickle and grow potentially infinite amounts of it.
A. No one dye is too much harder to find than others, however, magenta dye requires the most steps. So perhaps magenta dye is the rarest to obtain, but it only requires finding blue and red, then combining the resulting purple with pink (combining red and white). Since it requires another step, perhaps magenta is the hardest to craft, but certainly not too difficult. Otherwise, the rarest dye belongs to brown, as you can only get brown dye from cocoa beans, and jungles tend to be relatively rare.
A. There are many flower colors in Minecraft, but none will yield a green dye. You can find yellow, orange, and red tulips, pink peonies, blue orchids, etc. but you cannot find a flower that will give you green dye in Minecraft. Many flowers have green in them, but they will not give you green dye when placed in a crafting menu.
Congratulations, you now know what it takes to make green dye in Minecraft. Additionally, you now know the uses for green dye in Minecraft. Most of the green dye applications go for just about every dye available in Minecraft, and with 16 different options, there is a lot of room for creativity. Simply knowing what blocks can be dyed helps with understanding what options you have available to you. From dying the sheets of your bed, to the collars of your cats and dogs, to staining glass, there are a lot of color combinations you can accomplish.
All Issues
