Make and Use a Compass in Minecraft (2022)
Our guide focuses on the crafting and usage of a compass in Minecraft. We have also included a new type of compass added to the game recently, which points to the spot where the player last died. Use the table below to explore each section at your convenience.
How Does a Compass Work in Minecraft
Even though the appearance of a compass in Minecraft is like real-world compasses, its functionality is different. Instead of pointing in a specific direction, Minecraft’s compass points towards the spawn point of your world. It’s the location where you spawn in the world when you first load in. You just have to go towards the direction where its red pointer is pointing to reach the world spawn point.
Because that point is in the overworld, the compass points in random directions while it’s in the Nether and the End dimension. As for the activation, the compass always keeps pointing. It can be inside your inventory, in your hand, or even an item frame; the compass always points towards its assigned point. You can make it point to custom locations with the help of a loadstone, but more on that later.
How to Get a Compass in Minecraft
You can find a compass naturally available in chests at the following locations:
ShipwrecksStronghold LibrariesVillages with a CartographerAncient Cities
Out of these, the cartographer villager‘s houses have the highest chances of spawning with a chest that has a compass in them.
Trading for a Compass
You can trade with expert-level librarian villagers in Minecraft to get a compass in exchange for emeralds. Contrary to popular belief, the cartographer doesn’t sell the compass at any level.
Items Required to Make a Compass
To make a compass in Minecraft, you need the following items:
4 Iron Ingots1 Piece of Redstone Dust
You can use our Minecraft ore distribution guide to find iron ore and Redstone in no time. But keep in mind that mining the iron ore only gets you raw iron. You have to smelt it in a furnace or a blast furnace to get an iron ingot.
Crafting Recipe to Make a Compass
Once you have found the ingredients, you need to combine them using a crafting table to make a compass in Minecraft. To do so, you first need to place a piece of Redstone dust in the middle cell of the second row of the crafting area. Then, you need to surround the Redstone dust with iron ingots on all sides, leaving only the diagonal cells of the crafting area empty.
How to Make Compass Point to Bed
To make a compass point towards a bed or any custom location, you need to craft a lodestone. It’s a utility block in Minecraft that makes your compass point towards the location where the lodestone is placed. It ignores the original world spawn point after being connected to the lodestone.
Crafting Recipe for a Lodestone
To craft a lodestone, you need to combine 8 chiseled stone bricks with a netherite ingot. Use our linked guide to easily find Netherite in Minecraft. As for the bricks, you can use a stone cutter to craft them with ease.
The crafting recipe for the lodestone is shown in the image below. You need to place the netherite ingot in the middle and surround it with chiseled stone bricks.
When it’s ready, you just have to use the compass on the lodestone to activate it. This works even in the Nether and the End dimension. But if the loadstone gets destroyed, the connection will break, and the compass will start pointing to the world spawn point again. You can even have separate compasses pointing to different lodestones. This game mechanic is useful to mark different locations in the game.
Change World Spawn Point
If you want a permanent way to make your compass point towards a certain location, you can change that world’s spawn point. To do that, you can use the following command:
/setworldspawn x y z
Here, x,y, and z are the coordinates of the location you want to set the spawn point to. If you put “~” in place of the coordinates, the spawn point will be set to your current location.
Bonus: Make a Recovery Compass in Minecraft
Realistically, most Minecraft players only need a guide when they are looking for their lost resources on dying. Keeping that in mind, with the Minecraft 1.19 update, the game has introduced a new recovery compass.
You can craft it by combing echo shards with a regular compass. This new compass points towards the direction of the location where you last died. It’s useful to recover resources even if you don’t remember where you died.
Make and Use a Compass in Minecraft Today
Now that you know how to make a compass in Minecraft, you never have to get lost within Minecraft biomes again. You can freely create all the best Minecraft house ideas around your world without worrying about finding them. Though, traveling to faraway locations is another topic. If you don’t know how to teleport in Minecraft, it can become extremely tiresome to go around the world. Alternatively, you can also rely on these best Minecraft mods to solve this problem. But you’ll have to install Forge in Minecraft in order to run them properly. Having said that, what are you planning to use the compass for? Tell us in the comments!
