How To: Make a Blaze Trap in Minecraft

Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play with us on our free server.

The Nether is a dangerous place. It usually takes days of playing, creating enchanted armor, and using advanced potions until one is able to safely traverse the Nether. The risk, however, is equal to the reward. Nether mobs drop the best loot in the game. Ghasts, for instance, drop Ghast tears that create the only healing potion in the game.

The trouble with trapping and killing mobs in the Nether is that they are much more dangerous than other mobs, they are impervious to fire and lava, and while in the Nether, placing water in buckets is impossible. These difficulties almost make trapping impossible...almost. Today we will be creating a Blaze Trap with which you will be able to trap and kill Blazes, collecting their experience and the much sought after Blaze Rods. As you may know, Blaze rods are needed for creating brewing stands, strength potions, mundane potions, magma cream, and the eye of Ender. Needless to say, it's pretty useful stuff.

To create this trap successfully, you may need to be in 1.9 Version 5.

Before Creating the Blaze Trap

Before you go proudly to civilize the Nether and loot its rich goods, you will need to do some preparing. Our trap is going to be a water trap, but as you cannot place water buckets in the Nether, we will need to use ice blocks. When ice is normally broken, it simply disappears and so you will need to use a rather advanced enchantment known as "silk touch". When you use a pick axe enchanted with silk touch, the blocks you hit will not break, instead they will drop as blocks that you can pick up. Hence, you will be able to pick up ice as ice blocks to use in this water trap.

How do we get silk touch? We went over the basics of enchanting a few weeks ago and as you may have noticed, enchanting tables are strange. While the words that appear in the enchanting tables do have some meaning, they are not static. That is to say that sometimes silk touch will appear one way and sometimes it will appear another. The key to finding silk touch in the enchanting table is the number of experience points required to obtain it: 38. That may seem like quite a lot, but the Nether has some epic loot and as such, being able to obtain it requires a lot of time. 

How to Obtain Silk Touch

To enchant your pick axe with silk touch, you will need at least 38 xp, an enchanting table, and lots of bookcases. Bookcases are necessary to obtain the higher ranked enchantments in game and so by surrounding your enchanting table with bookcases completely, you will have access to all levels of enchantment, like in the picture above.

Open your enchanting table and in it, place your pick axe. You should see enchantments of various levels appear on the right. The enchantment you are looking for should be the only level 38 enchantment for pick axes, though the exact lettering may change.

Once you have obtained your pick axe enchanted with silk touch you need to go and collect ice blocks. You can do this by breaking ice that forms on top of water in snow biomes. 

Creating the Blaze Trap

Step 1 Find and Enclose a Blaze Trap

Head into the Nether and find a blaze trap. You will find these in Nether Dungeons only. 

To ensure that Blazes won't be able to escape by spawning outside of your trap, you'll need to enclose the trap. In my case, I had to remove these nether fences and expand the area of the trap. Be sure to enclose the Blazes in about an 8x8 area. 

Make sure you roof off the trap leaving no more than 3 blocks of vertical space.

Here is my trap finally enclosed, I left glass in the front so I can view the action and keep the first waves from escaping.

Step 2 Place the Ice Blocks

Water is the mechanism for this trap. The great news is that you won't need to drown the Blaze mobs—they're allergic to water and will die when it touches them. 

Place two ice blocks on top of the trap in the back and break them. 

For some reason, when ice is broken, the water that comes out doesn't immediately flow and so you'll need to break blocks near them to get the water flowing.

Water should be flowing from the back of the trap to the front. Be sure to leave no more than two blocks of head room for the Blaze, otherwise they will escape the water. When finished, the water should be hurting the Blazes while pushing them to the front of the trap.

Step 3 Create a Safe Area for Killing the Blazes

Unfortunately the Blazes will not drop their loot if killed by the water alone. You will need to offer the final blow in order to obtain experience orbs and blaze rods. To do so safely, remove some blocks from the front of your trap. Leave enough space with which to reach the mobs, while making sure they stay trapped inside.

From your safe vantage point you can now finish off mobs as they come down the trap. This should only take about 1 to 2 hits.

Here you can see me finishing off the mobs as they come down:

Their loot drops and collects at the end. All the while I am safe from harm.

As a tip, be sure that your trap is in a safe area. Blazes aren't the only thing looking to kill you in the Nether and you are at risk from the moment you turn your back, so be sure to take the necessary precautions. 

Congratulations, you now have access to a nearly endless supply of one of the most valued items in Minecraft. Be careful, collect your loot, and use it well.

As always if you have any questions about how this trap works, be sure to leave them in the comments section below.

If you enjoyed this or any other article be sure to come check out our Weekly Workshop today at 4pm CST, where we will be covering Minecarts!

Follow us on Twitter @MinecraftHowTo!