There’s nothing quite like the warm, solid look of brick blocks for Minecraft builds, whether you’re putting together a cozy riverside cottage, a fortified castle wall, or a decorative chimney for your base. If you’re new to the game, you might be surprised to learn that you can’t mine bricks directly from the world like cobblestone or wood. I remember getting frustrated my first playthrough when I couldn’t find any bricks to finish my first house, until I figured out the simple steps to make them myself. Today we’re breaking down every way how to get bricks in Minecraft, no matter what game mode you’re playing or how far along you are in your world.
How to Get Bricks in Minecraft via Basic Clay Crafting
This is the most common method for survival players, and it’s easy to pull off even in the first few days of a new playthrough. The entire process relies on clay, a common block found in shallow water bodies across the overworld. You don’t need any fancy tools to get started, though a shovel will speed up clay mining significantly.
First, head to a river, lake, or ocean shoreline to look for clay blocks. They’re pale gray, smoother than stone, and usually spawn partially submerged in shallow water. Each clay block you dig drops 4 clay balls, even if you use your bare hands. Clay generates most commonly in lush caves and river biomes, so if you’re struggling to find it along the coast, explore a long river system and you’ll likely stumble on huge patches of it.
Once you have a stack of clay balls, you’ll need to smelt them in a furnace. Each clay ball smelts into one individual brick, and you can use any fuel source from planks to coal to lava buckets for the smelting process. Using a blast furnace cuts smelting time in half compared to a regular furnace, so if you have access to one, it’s worth using to crank out large batches of bricks fast. When you have 4 individual bricks, you can combine them in a crafting grid to make one full brick block, the building material most players use for their builds.
Loot Bricks and Brick Blocks From Pre-Generated Structures
You don’t have to craft every single brick you use. The game generates bricks and full brick blocks in dozens of structures across the overworld, nether, and even deep dark, so you can collect them for free if you’re willing to explore a little. I once found enough brick blocks in a single village to build an entire small house, no crafting required.
These are the most reliable places to find pre-made bricks and brick blocks:
- Village mason chests: 30% chance to have 1-8 individual bricks, plus full brick blocks in many village paths, house walls, and chimney features
- Ruined portals: Both overworld and nether ruined portals often use brick blocks as part of their frame, which you can mine to take home
- Woodland mansions: Multiple rooms in these rare structures are built entirely of brick blocks, and chests inside occasionally have stacks of 10+ individual bricks
- Ancient cities: Deep dark ancient cities mostly use deepslate blocks, but you’ll find sections of regular brick blocks scattered across their structural supports
You don’t need a silk touch pickaxe to mine pre-placed brick blocks, any stone or better pickaxe will drop the full block directly. That means you don’t have to break them down into individual bricks and re-craft them, which saves you a ton of time. But make sure you don’t use your bare hands or a non-pickaxe tool, as you’ll just break the block without getting any drops.
Trade for Scalable Bricks With Mason Villagers
If you’re past the early game and have a village set up near your base, trading is by far the fastest way to get as many bricks as you want for large builds. I use this method exclusively now that I have a permanent village with multiple mason villagers, and I never have to dig up clay again for small or large projects.
All you need to get started is an unemployed villager and a stonecutter to assign them the mason job. Once they reach apprentice level (the second trade tier), they’ll offer 16 individual bricks for 1 emerald, which is an extremely fair price if you have a surplus of emeralds from farming, fishing, or other villager trades. If you defeat a raid and get the Hero of the Village effect, that price drops even lower, sometimes to 1 emerald for 32 bricks.
Mason villagers will also trade full brick blocks, brick stairs, and brick slabs at higher levels, so you don’t have to craft those variants yourself either. If you set up a simple villager trading hall with 2 or 3 masons, you can get thousands of bricks in just a few minutes of trading, no mining or smelting required. Just make sure you protect your villagers from mobs, especially if you’re trading at night.
Get Bricks Instantly in Creative Mode
If you’re playing in creative mode, you don’t have to worry about gathering resources, smelting, or trading at all. Bricks and all their variants are available directly in your inventory with zero work required.
You can find individual bricks in the ingredients tab of your creative inventory, or search for “brick” in the search bar to pull up every brick-related item at once, including full blocks, stairs, slabs, walls, and even decorative items like flower pots that are crafted from bricks. If you’re playing on a world with cheats enabled, you can also use the give command to get stacks of bricks directly, but most players just grab them from the inventory tab.
If you switch from survival to creative temporarily, you can grab stacks of bricks and switch back to survival to keep them, just make sure you have cheats enabled on your world first. This is a handy trick if you’re playing a survival world but don’t want to spend hours gathering bricks for a huge decorative build that doesn’t impact your survival progression. Just note that this won’t work on most public multiplayer servers, as cheats are usually disabled for regular players.
The method you choose to get bricks will depend entirely on your playstyle and where you are in your playthrough. Early game survival players will likely stick to crafting from clay or looting villages, while mid to late game players will save hours by trading with masons. Creative players can skip all the work entirely and grab bricks straight from their inventory. Bricks are one of the most versatile building materials in the game, fireproof, blast resistant, and stylish enough for almost any build you can imagine. Now that you know how to get bricks in Minecraft, you can get started on that big build you’ve been planning for weeks.