If you’ve ever tried to build a terracotta beach house, craft a set of flower pots for your base, or make glazed terracotta patterns for a custom build, you know how quickly you can burn through your clay stock. Many new players spend hours wandering coastlines and riverbeds without finding enough to finish their projects, and even veterans can run out mid-build if they don’t have a steady supply set up. Clay is the base ingredient for 12 different crafting recipes, from flower pots to terracotta to glazed terracotta variants, so it’s far more useful than many new players realize. We’re breaking down every reliable method so you know exactly how to get clay in Minecraft no matter what mode or platform you play on.
How to Get Clay in Minecraft: Core Natural Spawn Locations
Natural clay spawns are the easiest way to get small amounts of clay early in your survival playthrough, before you have the resources to build a dedicated farm. You can find clay blocks almost anywhere there’s shallow standing water, as long as the bedrock below is at least a few blocks deep. The most common spots to look are slow-moving riverbeds, shallow ocean floors less than 10 blocks below the surface, and the edges of swamp biomes. You can also find small clusters of clay blocks in lush cave water pools, if you prefer exploring underground over searching along coastlines.
You don’t need any special tools to break clay blocks, but using a shovel will speed up the process significantly. Clay blocks drop 4 clay balls each when broken with any tool, so a single stack of 64 clay blocks will give you 256 clay balls, enough for most small to medium builds. If you use a silk touch enchanted shovel to break clay blocks, you’ll get the full clay block instead of individual balls, which saves a ton of inventory space if you’re hauling large amounts back to your base. Just note that you can’t craft clay blocks back into clay balls if you change your mind later, so only use silk touch if you know you’re going to use the blocks directly for building or smelting into terracotta.
One common mistake new players make is digging too deep when looking for clay. Clay never spawns more than 5 blocks below the surface of the water, so if you’re diving further down than that, you’re wasting your time. Stick to shallow, clear water areas where you can see the light gray clay blocks from the surface, and you’ll find enough for your early game needs in 10 or 15 minutes of exploring.
Farming Clay for a Consistent, Unlimited Supply
Natural clay spawns will run out eventually, especially if you’re working on a large build that uses hundreds of terracotta blocks. For a never-ending supply of clay, you’ll want to build a simple mud-to-clay farm, a mechanic added in the 1.19 Wild Update that works on all vanilla Minecraft versions. This farm is cheap to build, requires almost no maintenance, and can be expanded as much as you want to produce thousands of clay balls per hour if you need it.
The mud-to-clay farm is the only infinite clay source in vanilla Minecraft, so it’s a must-build for any player who does a lot of building or crafting with clay-based materials. To build a basic version of this farm, you’ll only need a few common items:
- A stack of mud blocks (crafted by combining 1 dirt block with 1 water bottle in your inventory or crafting table)
- At least 10 pieces of pointed dripstone, which you can harvest from dripstone cave biomes with any pickaxe
- 20 or more solid building blocks (cobblestone, wood, or any other block you have on hand) to build the farm structure
- A chest and a few hoppers if you want to make the farm fully automatic, so you don’t have to manually harvest clay
Setting up the farm takes less than 10 minutes. First, build a 2-level platform: the bottom level should be 1 block above the ground, and the top level should be 2 blocks above the bottom level. Hang pointed dripstone from the bottom of the top level, so the tip of the dripstone is 1 block above the bottom platform. Place your mud blocks on the top of the top level, directly above the pointed dripstone. After 1 to 3 in-game days, each mud block will turn into a clay block, which you can break and collect. If you add hoppers below the bottom platform, they’ll automatically collect any clay balls that fall through when you break the blocks, so you can just leave the farm running and come back later to a chest full of clay.
This farm works on every Minecraft platform, including Java Edition, Bedrock Edition, Pocket Edition, and even console versions. You don’t need any mods or cheats to run it, and it’s allowed on almost all public survival servers, since it doesn’t exploit any game glitches. I built a 10x10 version of this farm on my own survival world last year, and I haven’t had to go looking for natural clay since.
Creative Mode & Modded Methods for Getting Clay Fast
If you’re playing in creative mode, you don’t have to worry about farming or searching for clay at all, since you have unlimited access to every block and item in the game. Creative mode players can find clay under the "Building Blocks" or "Miscellaneous" inventory tabs, or you can use the search bar to type “clay” and pull up both clay balls and full clay blocks instantly. You can use as much as you want without ever running out, so you don’t have to plan ahead for large builds.
For players on modded Minecraft servers or single-player worlds, there are dozens of alternative ways to get clay depending on the mods you’re running. Many popular tech and exploration mods add custom clay spawns, like clay deposits in desert biomes, or machines that let you turn dirt or stone into clay with a small amount of energy. Some magic mods even let you craft clay from magical essence, so you don’t have to build a farm at all.
Just make sure you check your server’s rules before using any modded clay farming methods. Some servers restrict custom resource generation to keep the in-game economy balanced, so you don’t want to accidentally get banned for using a modded clay farm that the server owners consider an exploit. If you’re playing single-player, you can adjust your mod settings to make clay as easy or as hard to get as you want, depending on your play style.
Pro Tips to Make Clay Gathering Faster and More Efficient
Even if you’re using a basic mud farm, there are a few small changes you can make to cut down on the time you spend gathering clay, so you can spend more time building and exploring. First, enchant your primary clay-gathering shovel with Efficiency V and Unbreaking III. This lets you break clay blocks almost instantly, so you can clear a full layer of clay from your farm in a matter of seconds. Using a Fortune III enchanted shovel on clay blocks will not increase the number of clay balls dropped, so don’t waste a Fortune enchant on a tool you only use for clay gathering, save it for ores like diamond or coal instead.
If you’re searching for natural clay early in the game, bring a boat with you. You can glide along shallow river and ocean edges way faster than you can walk, and the light gray color of clay blocks stands out clearly from dirt and sand when you’re looking down from a boat. I usually find enough clay for my first 10 flower pots and a few terracotta blocks in just 5 minutes of boating along a river near my spawn point, which is way faster than wandering on foot.
If you’re building a large mud farm, add a layer of glass blocks around the top platform where you place your mud. This stops mobs from spawning on your farm, so you don’t have to fight off creepers or skeletons when you go to harvest your clay. You can also add a few torches or glowstone blocks to light up the area, which also prevents mob spawns and makes it easier to see the clay blocks when you’re harvesting at night.
One last small hack: if you’re smelting clay into terracotta, you can smelt full clay blocks directly in a furnace instead of breaking them into clay balls first. Each clay block smelts into 1 terracotta block, which is the same amount you’d get from 4 clay balls, so you save a ton of time not having to craft clay balls into blocks before smelting. This cuts your terracotta production time almost in half for large builds.
No matter if you’re a new survival player just getting your first set of tools, or a veteran creative player working on a massive custom map, having a steady supply of clay makes every part of the game more fun. Knowing how to get clay in Minecraft means you never have to pause a build halfway through to run around searching for more materials, or waste inventory space hauling small stacks of clay back to your base. Try out the basic mud farm for your next playthrough, and you’ll never run out of clay for flower pots, terracotta builds, or any other project you want to tackle.