A water elevator is one of the simplest ways to quickly move between different levels of your base. With it, you can travel from the top of your tower all the way down in just a few seconds, without climbing ladders or building staircases. To build it, you only need a few easily obtainable blocks such as water buckets, Soul Sand, Magma Blocks, and kelp.
Building a Water Elevator in Minecraft
The first step is to prepare a vertical shaft. Choose the spot where you want to place the elevator and build walls around it using any building material. This can be stone, glass, or wood, depending on the visual effect you’d like to achieve. It’s important that the structure is sealed and reaches the height you want to travel to. On one of the walls, instead of placing two regular blocks, put in a door. This element serves a practical purpose, as it keeps the water inside the shaft while still leaving a convenient entrance to the elevator.
Once the shaft is ready, the next step is to fill it with water. You can do this by standing at the very top of the shaft and using a water bucket on the upper blocks. A single bucket is enough for the water to flow down and fill the entire shaft.
When you fill the shaft with water, you need to turn the flowing water into water source blocks. To do this, you will need kelp. Go inside the shaft and plant kelp from the bottom all the way up to the top, making sure every water block has kelp in it. After that, break all the kelp.
When the elevator shaft is cleared of kelp, go all the way down to the bottom and break the block beneath you.
When the shaft is cleared and the block beneath you has been removed, it’s time to place the element that makes the elevator work. In the spot of the removed block, you can place:
- Soul Sand – this will turn the entire column into an upward elevator, pushing players to the top with air bubbles.
- Magma Block – this will create a bubble column that pulls you downward. It’s a simple way to descend into a mine, cave, or underground base.
How to Get a Magma Block
Magma Blocks naturally generate in the Nether as well as at the bottom of underwater ravines. In the Nether, you can often find large patches of magma near lava lakes – they glow slightly, making them easy to spot. Underwater, they generate either individually or in small clusters on the ocean floor. To mine them, you can use any pickaxe, even a wooden one. Be careful, though – standing on a Magma Block deals damage!
How to Get Soul Sand
Soul Sand can only be found in the Nether, with the highest concentration in the Soul Sand Valley biome. This place is easy to recognize: it has a blue fog, is filled with skeletons and ghasts, and the ground is completely covered with Soul Sand. The block itself looks like brown soil with ghostly faces on its surface, and when you walk on it, it slows your movement.
How to Get Kelp
Kelp grows in most ocean biomes. These are tall plants that rise from the ocean floor all the way to the surface. To harvest them, simply swim up and break them with any tool – or even with your bare hand. Each block drops kelp as an item, which you can immediately replant if you wish.
How to Get a Bucket of Water
To create a Bucket of Water, you first need to craft a regular bucket. For this, you’ll need 3 iron ingots, which you can obtain by smelting iron ore in a furnace. Place the 3 ingots on the crafting table in a “V” shape, and you’ll get a bucket. Now, simply go to any water source – such as a river, lake, or ocean – and right-click on the surface of the water. The bucket will instantly fill up and become a Bucket of Water.
