- You can make a spyglass in Minecraft with two copper ingots, one amethyst shard, and a crafting table.
- Place the amethyst shard in the top row and add two copper ingots right below it in the middle and bottom rows.
- To use the spyglass, have iy selected on your hotbar and then hold right-click or use button to zoom in.
If you’re playing with OptiFine, one of the features you use the most must be the zoom feature. This is a useful mechanic that helps you easily spot mobs or blocks from further away. You may not know this, but the zoom feature is also available in the vanilla game, thanks to an item called spyglass. In this guide, we will show you how to make and use the spyglass in Minecraft. So without further ado, let’s begin!
Items You Need to Make a Spyglass
The only way to obtain the spyglass in Minecraft is to craft it. So, the resources you’ll need are:
- 1 Amethyst Shard
- 2 Copper Ingots
- Crafting Table
Amethyst shards are items you get by mining fully grown amethyst clusters with a non-silk touch pickaxe. These blocks generate on top of budding amethyst, blocks you only find inside amethyst geodes. If you’re wondering what geodes are, we have got a dedicated amethyst guide explaining everything you need to know about these magical purple blocks and items.
Copper ingots are items you can acquire by smelting raw copper inside a furnace or blast furnace. Raw copper is a drop from copper ores in your world. Our separate guides on ore distribution and copper blocks and items should help you obtain copper ingots. Finally, you’ll need a crafting table. This is a simple block you can craft with planks. It offers a 3×3 crafting grid, which is necessary for the spyglass crafting recipe.
Minecraft Spyglass: Crafting Recipe
After you obtain these simple resources, you can make a spyglass. Follow the steps below and you won’t have any issues.
- Place the crafting table in your world and right-click it or use the secondary action button to open its interface.
- Then, place the amethyst shard in any slot in the upper row.
- After that, you’ll want to fill the slots in the middle and bottom rows right below the amethyst shard with copper ingots.
- And that’s it. You’ll see a spyglass item appear in the result slot on the right. To craft it, you can just hover over it and click.
Alternatively, you can use a crafter block in Minecraft 1.21. It will function similarly to the crafting table, but you do need to power it for it to spit out the spyglass item.
How to Use a Spyglass in Minecraft
When you craft the spyglass, you can start zooming in Minecraft. To do that, simply have it selected and hold the right-click or use button. At first, you will see the animation start to play by creating a square vignette on your screen. This effect is similar to the carved pumpkin vignette, but not at all that annoying.
You can easily disable it by pressing F1, which will remove all the UI from your screen. The spyglass will pretty quickly zoom in on whatever you are looking at.
Essentially what this item does is change your FOV (field of view). It will decrease your FOV to one-tenth of the value you have in the settings. So, if you’re playing with the default FOV, which is 70 on Java and 60 on Bedrock, your zoomed-in FOV will be 7 and 6, respectively.
This means that you won’t be able to see things that you cannot already see. So, if a mob just got out of render distance, you won’t be able to see it even if you use the spyglass.
In addition, while using the spyglass you are slowed down a bit, so be careful when you use it. If, for some reason, you keep using the spyglass for a whole minute continuously, its interface will be closed automatically. Spyglass is necessary for completing three different advancements, which require you to look at a parrot, ghast, and the Ender Dragon through the spyglass.
And just like that, you now know all the basics of a spyglass in Minecraft. Zooming with the spyglass is not as convenient as it is in OptiFine, but it is a vanilla-friendly feature that’s fairly intuitive. With that, what are you planning to do with the spyglass? Are you advancement-hunting or want to play around with this fun item? Share your answers in the comments below!
The point of a spyglass is to help make blocks and items from further away more clear to you. So, if you’re looking at a build from a distance, you can easily figure out if you like certain blocks you used or if you need to change them. Moreover, if you’re observing dangerous mobs from a distance, the spyglass can help you figure out if they got out of range for you to run away safely.
You cannot put any enchantments on the spyglass. It is a tool, but it doesn’t have durability or any other special features.
Not directly. Spyglass is an item, so you cannot place it like you can a block. But, with item frames and invisible armor stands, you can make spyglass seem like a block and therefore create some pretty cool spyglass designs.
