How To Make Green Dye In Minecraft [Recipe Explained]

We’re going to tell you how to craft green dye in Minecraft and the correlated questions you might have around it because the game is all about customization, after all. Minecraft has been the mainstay for players with a creative bent who’re always looking to conjure new and unique experiences in this virtual world.

So personalization is encouraged in Minecraft and one of the most popular ways players do this is by modifying the visuals of everything from their armor to animals to banners to houses and more. And that’s where dyes come in. Minecraft has a bunch of different dyes for gamers to color almost everything around them. Dyes can be sourced from flowers, crafted from materials like bone, chest loot, or purchased from traders.

The process differs a bit for each color and making the green dye calls for a longer process than most other dyes. In this easy guide, we will explain how exactly you can craft it using only a few steps and what materials you need to do it. We’ll also delve into whether the process differs based on the Minecraft edition you’re playing and what you can do with the dye.

The Many Dyes Of Minecraft

There are a total of 16 dyes in Minecraft 1.19 or older currently — primary, quasi-primary, and secondary dyes. They are used to impart color to a variety of items, the most common of which include sheep, banners, shulker boxes, and firework stars. In Minecraft Bedrock and Education editions, other items can substitute for dyes. Although they cannot be called dyes, they may certainly be used to perform the same function.

Bone meal or lily of the valley, squid ink sacs, lapis lazuli, and cocoa beans can be used in crafting recipes to create white dye, black dye, blue dye, and brown dye, respectively. Dyes in Minecraft can be classified into three major categories: Primary, Quasi-primary, and Secondary.

Primary dyes can be created only from naturally-occurring ingredients and consist of:

• White Dye
• Black Dye
• Red Dye
• Yellow Dye
• Green Dye
• Blue Dye
• Brown Dye

Quasi-primary dyes are those that are created from other dyes:

• Light Gray Dye
• Lime Dye
• Light Blue Dye
• Orange Dye
• Pink Dye
• Magenta Dye

Lastly, secondary dyes can be created by combining two primary dyes:

• Gray Dye
• Purple Dye
• Cyan Dye

Not all dyes can be crafted easily and some are rarer than others.

Materials Required

Most dyes trace their origin to flowers, but green is different. You need to do a bit of smelting to craft it.

For creating this color, you need the following materials:

• Cactus
• Furnace
• Fuel source for the furnace

Cacti can be found in the desert biome in Survival mode (or in your inventory in Creative mode). When you start finding cactus, it’s much more efficient to hit the base rather than starting from the top. This is because if you do the latter, the loose item block might come into contact with another cactus and get destroyed.

You can also purchase cacti from wandering traders or find them in chests in a desert house. A regular furnace can be found in various areas apart from igloos and snowy village houses; or it can be crafted using cobblestones. You cannot make dye in a blast furnace. As for powering the furnace, you can use add fuel  in the form of coal, logs, planks or anything else that’s solely wood-based.

How To Make Green Dye In Minecraft Java Edition

Once you have obtained cactus from the desert or chests or bought it from a trader, you can start smelting it in a furnace.

1. The required items for a furnace are 8 cobblestones. You can use a pickaxe to mine stone and get the cobblestones in your inventory. Use the crafting table by putting the cobblestones in every slot except the middle one in the crafting grid.
2. With your furnace ready, you can start putting your cacti in the top box of the furnace and place any fuel of your choice in the bottom box. Fuel options cover coal, lava, saplings, wooden materials, and so on.
3. Take some time to relax as the furnace does its thing, smelting the cacti.
4. Once the white arrow is filled, you will see one green dye item appear on the right of your crafting table.
5. Transfer the dye to your inventory and you’re all set to put it to good use.

Once you’ve completed the entire process from sourcing the cacti to obtaining the dye from it, you might wonder whether you’d have to do it all over again the next time you want to color your sheep green. Fortunately, you can create a lasting and always-accessible source of cactus by using some sand and one cactus.

Simply place some sand where you want to grow a cactus garden. Then place a cactus on the sand. To keep a regular supply going, you’ll need to place another block of sand one space above and next to the cactus block. As a cactus block cannot be adjacent to any other block, it will immediately break away once it grows and touches the sand block above.

And now you have a never-ending supply of cactus right in your backyard.

How Do You Get It Fast?

So is smelting the only way to obtain green dye? No; there are a few other ways you can get hold of the uber-useful dye.

The first and relatively easier alternative is to simply buy it. You can purchase three pieces of green dye for one emerald from a wandering trader sometimes. You can minimize your cost further by locating expert-level shepherd villagers and exchanging an emerald for 12 of it.

The other way to find it is by looting village house chests in the desert biome. Since looting depends on luck and is not a sure-shot way to get green dye, it should not be your first choice.

Moreover, spending emeralds on dye instead of buying other rare items isn’t the most prudent of choices. Hence, crafting can be safely considered the most consistent and economical method to obtain it.

Minecraft Green Dye Farm

What if you want to grow cactus on an industrial scale and not just in a small garden? Minecraft always has an answer. What you need is a Green Dye Farm. You just need to have enough XP, materials, and some time on your hands.

The materials you need to craft a green dye farm are listed below:

• Sand blocks – 6
• Furnaces – 2
• Cacti – 2
• Chests – 6
• Hopper – 1
• Sticky Pistons – 2
• Glass Blocks – 4
• Levers – 3
• Some cobblestones

Now you can start bringing your farm to life by following these simple steps below:

1. Create a boundary for your farm with sand blocks.
2. Add the sticky pistons on top of the sand blocks.
3. Place cobblestones on top of the sticky pistons.
4. It’s time now to create a trench in the middle of the farm.
5. Place the chests in the trench and add hoppers on them.
6. Now you can simply watch your cacti grow to your heart’s content.

How To Craft In Bedrock And HyPixel Skyblock

Minecraft Bedrock Edition brought cross-play between platforms by introducing a unified experience to players, irrespective of the device on which they chose to play.

The process to make green dye in the Bedrock Edition is largely similar to that in the Java edition. You need cactus blocks, a furnace, and fuel to smelt the cactus into dye. Furnaces can be crafted using cobblestones on the crafting table (again, leave the middle slot empty in the crafting grid) and then used to load up your cactus and fuel. Then the last step is to transfer the finished product to your inventory.

The Hypixel Skyblock Edition of the game differs from the other editions in some ways. There is no ‘green dye’ in Hypixel Skyblock. It’s called ‘Cactus green’ instead. Similarly, there are no white or black dyes. They are respectively replaced by bone meal and ink sacks.

Again, the process to obtain green is the same. You need to get cactus from any source and smelt it to obtain the color for your dyeing purposes.

What Is It Used For?

What can you actually do once you have all the dye you need in your inventory? A great number of things, it turns out. Let’s look at some of them below:

1. Dyeing Your Tunics And  Green: Dyeing your leather tunics to your liking is one of the most popular uses of dyes in general. For a green leather tunic, in particular, you first need to collect 8 pieces of leather by killing cows, mooshrooms, rabbits or other animals and then use the crafting grid to stain your leather tunic green.
2. Crafting Green Collars And Wool: Coloring the collars and wool of your sheep and wolves becomes super handy with dye.
3. Making Building Blocks: You can obtain colored terracotta blocks by dyeing them green. Terracotta’s great for all kinds of building projects from rustic houses to cool barns to old world castles.
4. Coloring Tools And Items: Whether you want green armor and shulkers or need to color your bed or carpet green, you can find many uses for your cactus-based dye.
5. Making Balloons And Glow Sticks: Mobs are a great nuisance in Minecraft. You can create green balloons by combining the color with other items, and use them to make your enemies fly away from your house or farm. What’s more, you can even create green glow sticks using this dye.
6. Customize Banners: Making their banners attractive naturally appeals to most players. You can craft green-colored banners with dye.
7. Crafting Green Fireworks: One of the most fun things you can do with the dye is to create green-colored explosions by creating green firework stars.

How Do You Get Lime Dye?

Lime Dye is a quasi-primary dye and one of the most sought-after dyes in Minecraft. Lime dye can offer various uses in the game such as — dyeing your animals, armor, equipment, and even firework stars. Obtaining lime dye consists of combining two primary dyes which are green and white.

You already know how to craft green dye by smelting cacti in a furnace. Crafting white dye involves a few extra steps as below:

1. Obtain bones or bone blocks and use either of them in the crafting menu to create bone meal. You need to place a bone or bone block in the top left slot in a 3×3 crafting grid to create bone meal.
2. Now you need to do the same step with the bone meal you have created, to yield white dye.
3. The final step is to combine both colors in the crafting menu to create lime dye.

What Is The Rarest Minecraft Dye?

Though most of the dyes in Minecraft are primary dyes, some need more steps to craft and also involve many steps in the process. Brown dye and magenta dye may be considered the rarest dyes in the game.

The reason is that cocoa beans that are used in crafting brown dye can be only be found in the jungle biome and as for the magenta dye, its crafting process involves the most number of steps. Even the simplest of the methods to craft magenta dye consists of combining purple dye and pink dye, which in turn involves a few more steps to craft.