How To Make A Harming Potion In Minecraft: A Step-by-Step Guide

Most potions provide the player with useful buffs or positive effects to improve their gameplay such as increased strength, faster movement speed, immunity to fire, and so on.

However, there are also potions that give debuffs or negative effects to players or enemies such as losing HP immediately since it inflicts instant damage.

Gathering The Materials Needed To Make A Potion of Harming

Here is a quick summary of all the needed materials the harming potion recipe requires:

• Three Glass Bottles with Water (3 Sand Blocks/3 Glass Blocks)
• A Brewing Stand (3 Blocks of Cobblestone or its other variants + 1 Blaze Rod)
• Nether Warts
• Blaze Powder (Blaze Rods)
• Glistering Melon Slice (Melon Slice + 8 Gold Nuggets) or Spider Eyes
• Fermented Spider Eye (1 Spider Eye + 1 Brown Mushroom + 1 Sugar)

Brew Either a Potion of Poison or a Potion of Healing

1. Choose whether you want to make a Poison Potion or a Healing Potion to make a Potion of Harming.
2. The next step is to gather the materials to make either a Poison Potion or a Healing Potion. Potions of Poison are easy to brew since you only need spider eyes to make them. Spider eyes are dropped when you kill spider mobs.

1. On the other hand, you can brew Potions of Healing using glistering melon slices. If you already have melon blocks and gold ingots, then you are ready to craft glistering melon slices. If not, you can visit savannah villages, track down melon seeds in dungeons, or trade with wandering traders to get melon blocks.

1. After which, mine at least 1 block of gold ore (using at least an iron pickaxe) to get raw gold.
   
2. Smelt the raw gold using a furnace to produce 1 gold ingot.
   
   
3. Then, turn the ingot into 9 gold nuggets by placing it on a crafting table or the crafting interface in your inventory.

1. Place a melon slice on the center square in the crafting table interface and surround it with gold nuggets to get a glistering melon slice.

Craft Fermented Spider Eye

1. Gather the materials for a fermented spider eye which are 1 Spider Eye, 1 Brown Mushroom, and 1 Sugar.
2. Locate a sugarcane plant.
   
3. Craft sugar from the sugar cane.

1. Then, gather brown mushrooms from dark caves or from dark oak forests.
   
2. After that, get spider eyes by killing normal spiders or cave spiders.
3. Finally, put all three ingredients on a crafting table in no particular order to make a fermented spider eye.

Travel To The Nether Dimension

1. Build a portal and go to the Nether dimension.

1. Then, locate a Nether Fortress.
   
2. After which, kill some Blazes to get blaze rods to craft blaze powder and a brewing stand as well.
   Note: Be careful since Blazes deal a lot of fire damage. Remember to drink a fire resistance potion or wear your best enchanted armor whenever you go to the Nether.

1. Once you have secured these items, find some Nether warts, the red fungus, that are usually found on soul sand near staircases within the Nether Fortress. They will be used to make the awkward potion needed in brewing various potions.

1. Then, you can also get glowstone dust by mining glowstone blocks found near the Nether's ceiling as they can be used to enhance the potion you are brewing.

1. Finally, go back to the overworld to continue making a potion of harming.

Using A Brewing Stand To Make A Potion of Harming

Remember to follow these easy steps to start brewing a potion of harming:

1. Make sure that you already have a brewing stand ready to use. Right-click on it to open the brewing stand interface.
   
2. Add blaze powder to the box that corresponds to the same shape in the brewing stand interface to add fuel to it.

1. Place the 3 water bottles that you crafted earlier in the brewing stand menu.
   
2. The first potions you need to brew are awkward potions. To make an awkward potion, add a nether wart in the ingredient slot in the brewing stand interface and wait for a few seconds for it to finish brewing.

1. Once done, this process will turn each of the water bottles into an awkward potion. Do not remove them from the brewing stand.
   
2. After which, place either a spider eye or a glistering melon to turn the awkward potion inside the brewing stand into a potion of poison or a healing potion. You only need to choose one in this step.

1. Do not remove the healing potion or poison potion in the slots.
   
2. Check if you still have enough fuel in the brewing stand. Make more blaze powder by placing a blaze rod in the basic crafting interface.
   
3. Finally, to make a potion of harming, add the fermented spider eye into the ingredient slot in the brewing stand interface.

1. The fermented spider eye corrupts the potions and turns them into 3 bottles of potions of harming.
   

Quick Tip: Keep in mind that the instant damage does NOT work on undead mobs such as zombies and skeletons.

How To Make A Splash Potion Of Harming

After brewing, you can further enhance a Potion of Harming by adding these optional ingredients:

• Gunpowder
• Dragon's Breath
  
• Glowstone Dust

To make splash potions of harming, simply add gunpowder into the ingredient slot right after brewing a regular potion of harming. The gunpowder turns potions into splash potions that have a distinct shape with a pointed top. This will turn the potion into a variant that you can throw.

Moreover, if you add a Dragon's Breath as an ingredient to a splash potion of harming, it will turn into a lingering potion of harming. Similar to a splash potion, you can throw a lingering potion to the ground. It will have a similar effect as the Ender Dragon's breath attack.

Lastly, adding glowstone dust as an ingredient in the brewing stand upgrades the Potion of Harming into a Potion of Harming II which deals more instant damage. You can add Glowstone Dust to any variant (regular, splash, or lingering) as long as it is not yet upgraded.