Summary
Mojang’s sandbox title,Minecraft,has agreat variety of plants and treespresent in its world. Among them stands kelp, a plant that is tiny but has a great number of uses. It naturally grows in oceans, except those that are frozen, deep frozen, or warm. As such, players will organically come across many kelp growths in their playthrough, and they don’t even have to search far and wide. Since it’s an underwater plant, it can even be found growing in many shallow water bodies as well.
Kelp looks quite simple but comes with a wide array of uses inMinecraft. It is also a renewable resource, and quite easy to keep it going at that. Its usage, combined with the ease of replenishing stock, makes it one of the handier resources in the title.
5Kelp as Food
A Quick Food Item, But Not Filling
A great use of dried kelp, players can either eat it or use it as a source of fuel. However, dried kelp is not agreat source of food inMinecraftas it restores only one hunger level and0.2/0.6 hunger saturation(Bedrock or Java Edition).
One advantage is that the animation takes the least amount of time than other foods. As a result, it is handy to keep some on hand, as there may not always be enough time to slow down and eat a pork chop, for example. Since players almost always create a kelp XP farm, it is a reliable way of having a limitless supply of food or fuel. As the plant can easily be grown underwater and doesn’t need a light source either, players can have ready access to it even when they have an underwater build inMinecraft.
4Kelp in Composter
Use Kelp to Grow Bone Meal To Build Stock
Another great use of kelp is that it can be used to grow bone meal, a component that is extremely handy for farming inMinecraft. Players can obtain it through a variety of ways, like loot from chests, breaking down bones obtained from skeletons, and more. Many even create skeleton mob farms for the said purpose. But a simpler way is to add kelp to a composter. Dried kelp offers a 30% probability of adding a layer to a composter, and when maxed out, the block drops one bone meal.
As such, creating a kelp-composter farm can be extremely helpful in collectingseveral stacks of bone meal quickly inMinecraft. Such a project is way less labor-intensive than one involving mobs, and multiple setups can be constructed in any place players desire. Since many would be creating kelp XP farms as it is, this is a great way to use the product from one project as an ingredient in another.
3Kelp as Fuel
A Renewable Resource, Easier To Get Than Coal
Kelp is a great source of fuel, which comes in use especially if players are wonderinghow to set up and run important farms inMinecraft. This helps with XP too, which will be explained later on. To use it as a source of fuel, players first have to cook it to dried kelp via a campfire, smoker, or furnace. There are a couple of factors to consider here. While using the campfire requires no fuel, a smoker and a furnace are faster. Meanwhile, the latter gives XP (0.1) when one unit is collected. As such, players should make their choice depending on the situation at hand.
When talking about fuel, it’s better to add nine dried kelp together to make a block and stack up. This helps save space and reduces the manual labor of constantly re-adding fuel. One entire block can smelt 20 items, which is quite a decent use of kelp inMinecraft.
2Bubble Elevator
Create Elevators For Vertical Travel
One of the most famous uses of kelp inMinecraftis the bubble elevator, which is a genius creation that usesthe game’s updated mechanicsvery well. It comes in extremely handy in builds, especially those that players create at a grand scale.
The water elevator can only work if all the water blocks are source blocks. Since setting them up through other routes is needlessly tedious, using kelp is the preferred way to go inMinecraft. Once players fill a column with water and add the plant, the normal blocks are turned into source blocks. Finally, the plant is destroyed at the end and the bottom block is replaced by either magma block (downwards travel) or Soul Sand (upwards travel).
The elevator providesswift and automatic vertical travelthrough water, very much like the pipes seen in cartoons likeFuturama, or other futuristic ways of travel in movies. It does look a little odd since players travel through water, which is also why it looks concerning to beginners. However, the elevator has oxygen, as can be seen by the bubbles traveling throughout its length. This ensures that players don’t drown even if the elevator is as tall as possible. This is a great use of kelp inMinecraftand one that many, many players create for their builds.
1Kelp XP Farm
Easy To Make And Produce, But Expect Slow XP Quantities
Easily the most important use of kelp inMinecraft, a kelp XP farm is a great utility build that players should set up. There are various other creations as well, likethe Enderman farm, but this one doesn’t take a long time to wait or set things up. As such, players can create it fairly early on if they go after it aggressively. And since the product, dried kelp can be used as a source of food, fuel, and even as a component in farms (even the one right here) it’s a pretty good choice all around. Another positive is that it can be set up in nearly any biome, and players don’t have to engage in dangerous circumstances to get one up and running.
There are multiple types of such kelp XP farms available inMinecraft, but the fundamental basis remains the same - large-scale cooking of kelp into dried kelp, and the XP gain on collecting the product. The amount of XP collected from one dried kelp in a furnace is a meager 0.1, yes, but that’s where the massive scale comes in. And if something does go wrong, like say a change in the mechanics after a patch, troubleshooting is simple as well. Overall, kelp has many important uses and is thus a great plant to cultivate.
