5 Best Uses for Bone Meal in Minecraft

In Short
  • One of the most common uses of bone meal is fertilizing crops in Minecraft. This action multiplies them or speeds up their growth.
  • Moreover, you may craft bone blocks and white dye with bone meal and use it to color different blocks in the game.
  • It's possible to create new plants by using bone meal and also automate many farms using bone meal in dispensers.

If you’re doing pretty much anything with plant blocks, you will need bone meal in Minecraft. It not only speeds up the growth process but can multiply some blocks and also help automate a bunch of farms. Today, we will explain 5 different uses of bone meal and how incredible it is in Minecraft. So let’s begin!

1. Fertilizing and Multiplying Crop and Plant Blocks

One of the most popular uses of bone meal is fertilizing plants. When you use this item on a non-fully grown crop like a carrot, the crop will mature up to 5 growth stages. This applies to all sorts of crops and plants in Minecraft, such as wheat, potatoes, beetroot, cocoa beans, melon, or pumpkin seeds.

Apart from helping the crop grow a couple of stages, bone meal can also multiply blocks such as ferns, bamboo, moss blocks, kelp, sea pickles, pink petals, and more. This mechanic will let you obtain various resources quickly, be it crops for food or materials for crafting and smelting.

Player using bone meal to grow crops, bamboo and tall grass

However, you cannot use bone meal on every plant block. The ones unaffected by bone meal are:

2. Make a Bone Block

Bone meal is a part of two crafting recipes in both Minecraft editions. Those include the recipe for white dye (more on this later) and bone block. Thanks to the latter recipe, it’s possible to compact bone meal and carry 576 of them in a single inventory slot.

You can always break down the bone block and get bone meal. Also, the bone block itself is pretty cool as a building block that goes well with quartz blocks, end stone blocks, and others.

Crafting recipe for a bone block

4. Creating New Plant Blocks

Sometimes while using bone meal on a plant, you may get completely different plants too. This is the case for bone mealing grass blocks. The surface will grow short and tall grass, as well as one-block tall flowers. In addition, by using bone meal on a two-block tall flower, the item of that flower will get dropped, essentially duplicating the flower.

Using bone meal on saplings will grow trees, so you can easily and quickly gather wood. Whereas, if you bone meal mushrooms, huge mushrooms consisting of mushroom blocks will grow. Underwater blocks will grow seagrass if bone mealed and nylium will spread to an adjacent netherrack block and will grow fungus on top.

Player using bone meal to grow a tree, huge mushroom, seagrass and short grass and flowers

4. Color Items with White Dye

Bone meal has a special use on the Bedrock edition, similarly to lapis lazuli and ink sac. These are all color dyes in Minecraft. Bone meal behaves like a white dye and is therefore a part of all dye recipes in the game, such as for white terracotta, white concrete, white glass, white glass panes, white wool, lime dye, light blue dye, and others.

Moreover, you may use bone meal to color sheep, pets’ collars, water in a cauldron, and more. As for how you make white dye, it’s simple. Place bone meal in the crafting grid to get white dye.

  • Crafting recipe for white dye utilizing bone meal in Minecraft
  • Crafting recipe for white terracotta blocks in Bedrock edition

5. Automate Plant Farms with Bone Meal

One of the best properties of bone meal is that dispensers can use it similarly to players. Because of this, it’s possible to automatically produce and obtain all the plant blocks that can grow with bone meal. Just some of the farms that use this item are moss farms, nano crop farms, flower farms, tree farm, mushroom farms, and many more.

Dispenser using bone meal on a two-block tall flower in Minecraft

With that said, you know about the top bone meal uses in Minecraft and how important it is. This item single-handedly greatly improves the Minecraft experience and offers various opportunities. So, what do you use bone meal for the most? Let us know in the comments below!

Why won’t my tree grow with bone meal?

Sometimes, the sapling is way too close to a block and it just won’t grow, no matter how many bone meal you use. This is the case if you’re growing large spruce trees and place 8 saplings all side by side. By using bone meal on the saplings no trees will grow and you’ll simply waste bone meal.

Our suggestion would be to first place 4 saplings, bone meal them into a large spruce tree and then add 4 saplings directly next to the tree. By using bone meal on the other 4 saplings, large spruce tree will grow with no issues, even though there is a tree right beside it.

Does bone meal work on sugar cane?

Bone meal works on sugar cane, but only in the Minecraft Bedrock edition. Otherwise, in Java edition, it doesn’t speed up the sugar cane’s growth.

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