How to Create Infinite Lava in Minecraft

One of the most frustrating things about creating large and complicated builds in Minecraft is having to run back and forth to collect lava. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to make infinite sources for both, making it far easier to create renewable resources out of normally rare blocks like obsidian.

In this tutorial, we’ll describe how to make an infinite lava source in Minecraft.

What Is Infinite Lava and Why Is It Important?

In Minecraft, lava is usually a finite resource. Like water, lava can be collected in buckets. However, every time you collect a source block of lava, it disappears. This means that if you use all the lava in a given area, you’ll have to search for more.

It also means that every time you need more lava, you’re going to have to run back to the source to retrieve it.

Infinite lava is helpful as it allows players to have a constant source of lava inside their base, dramatically cutting down the amount of time it takes to collect it. This can be seriously useful if you have stacks of blocks that you want to smelt.

Infinite lava can be used to:

  1. Fuel furnaces, blast furnaces, and smokers. A bucket of lava is the longest burning fuel source in Minecraft, meaning that for every bucket of lava, you can smelt far more materials than you can with coal.
  1. Create cobblestone by having lava flow into water.
  2. Create obsidian by having water flow over lava, letting you easily farm the materials you need for a Nether portal.

How to Create Infinite Lava in Minecraft

There are two ways to create unlimited lava in Minecraft. You can either craft an infinite lava source using in-game materials, or use mods or commands to generate lava as desired. We’ll explain how to do all three for both Minecraft Bedrock and Java Edition.

How to Build an Infinite Lava Source

To create an infinite lava source, you need the following materials:

  1. A bucket of lava. A bucket can be created using three iron ingots in a bucket shape as below. To collect lava, simply hold the bucket and right-click one of the source blocks in a lava pool.
  2. One pointed dripstone block. These occur naturally in dripstone caves in the overworld and can be collected using any kind of pickaxe.
  3. A cauldron. A cauldron can be created using seven iron ingots using the crafting recipe below.
  4. Several fireproof blocks. Almost anything that isn’t wood or wool will work.

To create your lava generator:

  1. Place the cauldron on the ground.
  1. Add a fireproof block two blocks above the cauldron.
  1. Place the pointed dripstone underneath the fireproof block.
  1. Add more fireproof blocks around the top fireproof block to create a bucket shape so that lava can’t escape.
  1. Empty a bucket of lava into the hole. The cauldron should now slowly fill with lava.

Note: This is a scalable design, meaning you can create an infinite lava farm using rows of this lava generator.

How to Get Infinite Lava Using Commands

If you’re playing survival mode and don’t mind using cheats to source your materials, there’s an easy command that can grant you an infinite amount of lava buckets.

  1. Press the T key to open the command prompt.
  2. Type the following and press Enter:

/give @a minecraft:lava_bucket 64

You should now have a stack of lava buckets in your inventory. Simply repeat this command when needed and you’ll have enough lava for any amount of smelting.

Infinite Lava? No Problem

Having an infinite source of lava in a survival world is a massive help, especially when you want to smelt a bunch of stone blocks for a big building project. Hopefully, with this tutorial, you’ll have your infinite lava farm up and running in no time.