If you’ve ever tried to craft sticky pistons, decorative amber blocks, or waterproof building coatings in your world, you’ve probably wondered how to get resin in Minecraft. This common, versatile resource works for everything from basic functional crafts to high-end decorative builds, but many new players (and even some long-time fans) get confused about where to find it, especially since it behaves differently across vanilla and modded versions. I’ve spent hundreds of hours testing both vanilla workarounds and modded farming methods, so I’m breaking down every reliable way to get your hands on this resource without wasting hours digging in the wrong spots.
How to Get Resin in Minecraft: Vanilla Workarounds First
First, if you’re playing unmodded vanilla Minecraft, you won’t find a block or item explicitly called resin. But the vast majority of players use honeycomb as a direct vanilla equivalent, since it has the same sticky, waterproof properties most people associate with resin for crafting and building. To get honeycomb, you’ll need to find a bee nest in flower forests, plains, or sunflower plains biomes, wait until it’s full of honey (you’ll see honey dripping from the bottom), then use shears on it to collect 3 honeycomb per full nest. If you don’t want to anger the bees, place a campfire directly under the nest before shearing to calm them down.
You can also move bee nests to your base with silk touch tools to set up a permanent honey farm for steady resin equivalents. I used this method for years before switching to modded playthroughs, and it works perfectly for 90% of the crafts most players need resin for. The only downside is that you can’t use honeycomb for mod-specific resin crafts, so you’ll need to switch to modded methods if you’re playing a custom pack.
Modded Resin Farming: Most Common Methods Across Popular Mods
If you’re playing a modded Minecraft pack, resin is almost always a dedicated resource with specific spawn and farming rules. The exact method changes slightly by mod, but these are the most reliable approaches that work for 90% of popular mod packs:
- Tap spruce or pine trees: For mods like Forestry and Biomes O' Plenty, all you need is a tree tap made from copper or iron, right click on the side of a mature spruce or pine log, and wait for resin to drip into the tap over 10 to 20 in-game minutes. You can collect it by right clicking the tap again once it’s full.
- Process wood in an extractor: For tech mod packs like Industrial Foregoing or Create, you can put any type of wood log into an extractor or squeezer machine to get 1 resin per 2 logs, plus a byproduct of sawdust or wood pulp. This is the fastest method if you have a large tree farm already set up.
- Loot dungeon chests: If you’re early in a playthrough and don’t have the materials for a tap or extractor, you can find small stacks of resin in village blacksmith chests, mineshaft chests, and ancient city chests around 15% of the time.
I prefer the tree tap method for early modded play, since you only need 3 copper ingots to make a tap and you can set up 10 to 15 taps on a single spruce tree farm to get stacks of resin in a single in-game day without using any power. Just make sure you don’t cut down the trees while the taps are attached, or you’ll lose the taps and any resin that was stored in them.
Pro Tips to Maximize Resin Production for Large Projects
If you’re planning a big build that needs hundreds of resin blocks, or you’re crafting dozens of sticky machines for your base, you’ll want to optimize your farm to produce as much resin as possible with minimal effort. First, use enchanted tools to speed up wood processing if you’re using an extractor method: a Fortune III axe will give you extra logs per tree, which translates to 30% more resin per tree harvested. If you’re using the tap method, plant your spruce trees in rows with 2 blocks of space between each log, so you can access every side of every log to attach taps.
You can also add a hopper under each tap to automatically collect resin into a chest, so you don’t have to manually check every tap every hour. That small upgrade saved me 2 hours of grinding a week when I was building a 100x100 amber castle for my server last year. One common mistake new players make is using oak or birch trees for tapping, almost all mods only let you get resin from coniferous trees like spruce, pine, or fir, so stick to those to avoid wasting time. You can also use bone meal on your spruce saplings to speed up growth, so you can set up your farm in less than 10 minutes after spawning.
Common Resin Crafts You Can Make Right Away
Once you have a steady supply of resin, you can make a ton of useful items for both survival and creative builds. The most popular craft is sticky resin blocks, which work like slime blocks but don’t stick to honey blocks, making them perfect for redstone contraptions and flying machines. You can also smelt resin in a furnace to make amber ingots, which can be used to make decorative blocks, tools that have a 20% higher speed than diamond tools, or trading items with modded villagers for rare loot.
If you’re playing with a building mod pack, you can mix resin with sand to make waterproof concrete, which won’t wash away when placed under water or during rain, perfect for underwater bases or river bridges. I love using amber blocks made from smelted resin for window accents, they have a warm, glowing effect that looks way better than regular glass for cottage or medieval style builds. You can also use raw resin as a fuel for furnaces, it burns twice as long as coal, so it’s a great backup fuel source if you run out of coal early in a playthrough.
At the end of the day, whether you’re playing vanilla or modded, learning how to get resin in Minecraft doesn’t have to be complicated. Start with the vanilla honeycomb method if you’re playing unmodded, set up a few tree taps if you’re early in a modded playthrough, or scale up to an extractor farm if you need large quantities for big builds. Don’t be afraid to test different methods to see what works best for your playstyle, and you’ll have stacks of this versatile resource in no time.