How to Make (and Use) a Barrel in Minecraft

Inventory management in Minecraft can be pretty rough. Luckily, apart from the inventory space you have, the game provides a bunch of ways to store your belongings through containers. Among them is one block that’s frequently used in many different scenarios, thanks to its appearance and properties — the barrel. It’s the block we have dedicated this whole guide to, so get ready to learn what the crafting recipe for the barrel in Minecraft is.

Items You Will Need to Make a Barrel

To make a single barrel, you will need the following ingredients:

• 6 Wooden Planks
• 2 Wooden Slabs
• Crafting Table

Planks and slabs are fairly straightforward to get. You can break down a log into 4 planks and then place 3 of them in a row on the crafting table to craft 6 wooden slabs.

Chopping down three logs should give you enough of the required resources, including the crafting table. For making a barrel, you can use wooden planks and slabs of any wood type and also combine them.

Minecraft Barrel: Crafting Recipe

After you make or find some planks and slabs, follow the steps below to make a barrel in Minecraft.

• Place the crafting table in your world and right-click it to open its UI.
• Start this recipe by placing a slab in the central slot of the topmost row.
• Next, place the second slab in the central slot of the bottommost row.

• After that, you need to completely fill the left and right columns with planks, so only the central slot of the grid is empty.
• And that’s it. You will now see the barrel item in the result slot on the right.

Alternatively, you can also use the new crafter block in Minecraft 1.21. Most steps are completely identical, with the only difference being the final crafting action. You’ll need to power the crafter once (using a redstone signal) for it to spit out a barrel item.

Where to Find a Barrel in Minecraft World

Barrels can occasionally generate in your blocky world. However, there’s only one location where you will find it in your Minecraft world, and it’s the fisherman houses in villages.

Barrels will regularly generate naturally in these buildings, turning villagers into fishermen. But the villagers cannot get enough of this block, so you’ll even find it in the chests of these houses. There is about a 24% chance that the chest will contain up to 3 barrels inside.

Best Ways to Use a Barrel in Minecraft

1. Container Block

The primary use of a barrel is to store items inside. Its inventory space is equal to that of a single chest in Minecraft. Also, you cannot place barrels one next to each other and have them combine their inventories into a double chest’s.

Then the question is, why would you use a barrel instead of a double chest? In Minecraft, barrel is a solid block, unlike a chest. That means you can place it wherever you want and still be able to access its inventory if you can right-click on it. So, using a barrel is a lot easier than using a chest or a double chest.

2. Decoration & Building

Barrel’s texture and ability to rotate in all different directions make it one of the most frequently used decorative blocks in Minecraft. Its primary wood color matches almost perfectly with spruce wood, arguably the best wood type in the game. This makes barrels a great detail you could add to your spruce constructions.

Moreover, thanks to the fact you can access the barrel’s inventory easily, it is often presented as a loot storage option in many mini-games. On the more simple side, however, the barrel also looks like a crate, which makes it great for decorating docks, massive cargo ships, or the basement of a tavern build.

3. Villager Workstation

Another major use of a barrel is that it’s the workstation block for one of the villagers. If you place it down near an unemployed villager, they will turn into a fisherman. This villager job may seem a bit useless, but one of their best trades is the campfires. This ordinary block can get super expensive to craft, so having another way of obtaining it is rather useful.

If you reached the end of this guide, congrats! Now you know everything you need to know about a barrel in Minecraft. We’ve included the uses of this block in this guide as well. With that, what are your thoughts on this block? Do you like storing items in barrels or would you rather use them for decoration? Let us know in the comments below!