How to Make and Use a Lightning Rod in Minecraft

The upcoming Minecraft Fall 2025 drop is bringing a huge copper overhaul, introducing brand-new items to the copper family. Along with the Copper Golem, tools, and armors, we now have oxidized variants of the lightning rod in the game. The lightning rod is useful in Redstone mechanics and for redirecting lightning towards itself. So, in this guide, let’s learn how you can make a lightning rod in Minecraft, along with all its uses as well.

Items Required to Craft a Lightning Rod in Minecraft

The crafting recipe of the lightning rod requires only 3 copper ingots. In order to obtain copper ingots, you will first need to mine a few copper ores in the overworld. Mining copper ores gives you access to raw copper, which you can later melt in a furnace to get copper ingots.

Apart from these, you need a crafting table, on which you can place the required ingredients to get the lightning rod.

How to Make a Lightning Rod in Minecraft

Now that all the materials are in hand, you may follow the given steps below to craft a lightning rod:

• Place and right-click on the crafting table to open its UI.
• Now fill the center column of the 3×3 grid with three copper ingots.
• The lightning rod will appear in the right cell in the crafting table.
• You can collect it by dragging and dropping it into your inventory.

How to Use a Lightning Rod in Minecraft

The lightning rod can be placed anywhere on the ground or any solid surface. In order to pick up a lightning rod, you will need to break it using a pickaxe. One of the unique features of the rod is that it’s transparent in nature, which means mobs can pass through it at any time. That said, check out the uses of the lightning rod in Minecraft:

1. Redirecting Lightning

A lightning rod, when placed on a surface, can redirect lightning to itself during a thunderstorm or when hit by a Trident with the channeling enchantment. Moreover, in the Bedrock edition, as long as the rod has a transparent block directly on top of it, it will receive lightning strikes.

You can use this feature of the lightning rod to get mob heads in Minecraft. Simply make a chamber with a lightning rod to get charged creepers, and then explode them near the mob whose head you wish to add to your collection.

2. Redstone Mechanics

As you might know, copper conducts electricity in real life. Similarly, the lightning rod works with Redstone in Minecraft to conduct signals. The lightning rod can emit a Redstone signal as high as 15 when struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. This is the same Redstone signal strength emitted by a Redstone torch as well.

However, the only disadvantage is that it won’t work if there is no thunderstorm. Moreover, when the lightning strikes the rod, the signal will stay for just 8 game ticks, which won’t be fruitful for making structures that require continuous Redstone signals. So, you may use lightning rods in making a detector that lights up when a thunderstorm occurs in the game.

3. Oxidative States of Lightning Rod

The above given recipe will always give you a rusty orange color, a completely unoxidized lightning rod. Moreover, in the current stable game drops of Minecraft, you won’t find any oxidations on the lightning rod as well. This will be changed in the Minecraft Fall drop, and we will update this page accordingly.

From the Minecraft snapshots that came out recently, the lightning rod has 4 oxidative states, similar to other copper blocks. So, with time, the lightning rod becomes greener as it transforms to an oxidized rod. You may still remove its patina by scraping off using an axe.

So, have you created any Minecraft house builds where the lightning rod may find its use other than as a thunderstorm detector? Let us know in the comments below.