Everyone needs to sleep — even NPCs and avatars in Minecraft. However, you can’t simply create a wooden shack and sleep on the floor. That’s bad for your virtual back, for starters. Instead, we show you how to make a bed in Minecraft so you can quickly pass the time while the skeletons roam outside your door.
Beds aren’t just for fast-forwarding the clock, however. They serve as spawn points too, overriding your realm’s default spawning location. You’ll appear within a few blocks of your bed unless something blocks the spawn point, forcing you to reemerge in the world’s default location — which could be miles away.
Further reading
What you need
Wood – Find yourself a tree and chop it down. Your lumberjack skills will result in small blocks of wood (Survival Mode) scattered across the terrain that you need to gather. You can use tools and weapons — even your fists — to chop down trees, but not swords.
Wool – You’ll need shears to gather wool from live sheep, or kill them and gather wool from their remains. You could build an automatic wool farm, but that’s an entirely different guide. As shown above, we already applied dye to two sheep before shaving them bald. Naked sheep!
Craft a basic bed
This method is based on white wool. If you want a colorful bed, move on to the next section in this guide.
Step 1: Open your Crafting Table and drag one wood block from your inventory to any of the nine squares in the crafting grid.
1 wood block = 4 wood plank blocks
Step 2: Drag the resulting four wood plank blocks into your inventory. You’ll need three wood plank blocks to create a bed.
Step 3: Place one wood plank block each into the bottom three squares in the crafting grid, as shown below.
Step 4: Place one wool block each of the same color into the middle three squares in the crafting grid.
Step 4: Drag your new bed into your inventory.
Craft a colorful bed
Sheep are typically black, white, gray, light gray, and brown. If you want purple or blue sheets, you’ll need to dye the wool first. That means gathering items and combining them in the Crafting Table or Furnace.
Create your dye
Here is the current color palette, what you need to create each dye, and how to create them. Remember to drag the resulting dye down into your inventory so you can apply it to wool later. Note that green is the only dye that requires the Furnace.
Black (Crafting Table)
- One Ink Sac or Wither Rose in the first box
Blue – Light (Crafting Table)
- One Blue Orchid in the first box
- One Blue Dye in the first box and one White Dye in the second box
Blue – Normal (Crafting Table)
- One Lapis Lazuli or Cornflower in the first box
Brown (Crafting Table)
- One Cocoa Beans in the first box
Cyan (Crafting Table)
- One Blue Dye in the first box and one Green Dye in the second box
Gray – Dark (Crafting Table)
- One Black Dye in the first box and one White Dye in the second box
Gray – Light (Crafting Table)
- One Azure bluet in the first box
- One Gray Dye in the first box and one White Dye in the second box
- One Black Dye in the first box and one White Dye in boxes two and three
Green (Furnace)
- One Fuel and one Cactus
Lime (Crafting Table)
- One Green Dye in the first box and one White Dye in the second box
Magenta (Crafting Table)
- One Allium or Lilac in the first box
- One Blue Dye in the first box, one Red Dye in the second box, and one Pink Dye in the third box
- One Blue Dye in the first box, one Red Dye in the second and third box, and one White Dye in the first box, middle row
- One Purple Dye in the first box and one Pink Dye in the second box
Orange (Crafting Table)
- One Orange Tulip in the first box
- One Red Dye in the first box and one Yellow Dye in the second box
Pink (Crafting Table)
- One Pink Tulip in the first box
- One Peony in the first box
- One Red Dye in the first box and one White Dye in the second box
Purple (Crafting Table)
- One Blue Dye in the first box and one Red Dye in the second box
Red (Crafting Table)
- One Poppy, Red Tulip, Rose Bush, or Beetroot in the first box
White (Crafting Table)
- One Bone Meal or Lily of the Valley in the first box
Yellow (Crafting Table)
- One Dandelion or Sunflower in the first box
Dye your wool
You already completed the hard part: Creating your dye. Now you can color your collected wool.
Step 1: Open the Crafting Table.
Step 2: Place a block of wool in the first box on the bottom row and your dye next to it in the second box, as shown above. The base color of your wool doesn’t matter, as the wool changes to the color of your dye.
You can also dye wool still attached to sheep. Just hold the dye in your hand and select the sheep (right-click, left trigger, or tap and hold), which will permanently change its color. You can breed sheep of different colors to generate offspring with a possible secondary color.
Craft your colorful bed
Now that you have dyed wool — magenta in our example shown above — you can create a bed with colored sheets.
Step 1: Place one wood plank block each into the bottom three squares in the crafting grid.
Step 2: Place one wool block of the same color each into the middle three squares in the crafting grid.
Step 3: Drag your new bed into your inventory.
Place and use your bed
There’s no need for instructions here — just move the bed into your hotbar, select it, and perform the following to place it in the world. Remember, a bed requires two blocks of space.
- PC – Right-click on the destination
- Console – Target the destination and press the left trigger
- Mobile – Tap on the area
Once you have the bed in position, you can sleep by performing the following:
- PC – Right-click on the bed
- Console – Target the bed and press the left trigger
- Mobile – Tap on the bed
