How to Make a Spyglass in Minecraft

Modded players have zoomed with OptiFine for years, but vanilla Minecraft has its own answer: the spyglass. It's a simple brass tube with an amethyst lens, and while it won't load chunks any further away, it makes everything inside your render distance far easier to inspect. Here's how to make one and what it's genuinely useful for.

Materials: One Shard, Two Ingots

• 1 amethyst shard
• 2 copper ingots

The copper is the easy part. Copper ore is everywhere in caves — especially around Y=48 and in dripstone caves, where veins run huge — and smelting raw copper in any furnace gives you ingots.

The amethyst shard takes an expedition. Shards drop when you mine a fully grown amethyst cluster, and clusters only grow on budding amethyst blocks inside amethyst geodes: those hollow purple spheres buried underground and occasionally exposed in ocean floors or cave walls. Listen for the soft chiming sounds as you walk near one. Mine clusters without Silk Touch to get four shards per cluster; with Silk Touch you get the cluster block itself instead, which is decoration, not crafting material.

The Crafting Recipe

At a crafting table, place the amethyst shard in the top slot of any column, then put one copper ingot directly below it and the second copper ingot below that. A vertical line of shard-over-ingot-over-ingot produces the spyglass. The column you choose doesn't matter, and since it's a shaped recipe, the order does — the shard must be on top.

How the Zoom Works

Hold the spyglass and hold down the use button. A square vignette closes in — press F1 on Java if you'd rather hide the frame and the rest of the HUD — and your field of view narrows to one tenth of its setting. On the default FOV of 70, you're effectively looking through a 7-degree window, which makes a distant pillager tower or a friend's build fill your screen.

Know the limits before you rely on it:

• It magnifies, it doesn't extend. Anything beyond your render distance stays invisible no matter how good the zoom is.
• You move slowly while looking. Scouting from a cliff edge is fine; scouting mid-chase is not.
• It puts itself away. Stare through it continuously for a full minute and the view closes on its own.
• It can't be enchanted and has no durability — craft one and it works forever.

What It's Actually Good For

Day to day, the spyglass earns its hotbar slot while exploring. Check whether that distant shape is a village or just an odd hill before you walk twenty minutes toward it. Count the pillagers on an outpost tower before deciding how to approach. Read the banner colors on a woodland mansion, inspect a shipwreck from the boat, or find the gap in a fortress wall from across the lava. Builders use it differently — step back from a big project and zoom in to check whether a roofline or a pattern reads properly from the distance most people will actually see it.

Three Advancements Need One

Advancement hunters have a specific reason to craft a spyglass: three advancements require looking through it at particular mobs. Spy on a parrot at close range, catch a ghast through the lens, and watch the Ender Dragon circle its perch. They're among the most charming advancements in the game, and all three are impossible without this little tube — one more reason every survival world deserves one in a chest by the door.