Updated to 1.20
Lily Pads are very unique Minecraft items. They are primarily decorative, but they have very practical uses that only them can offer. Today we will see what makes them so unique, where to find them, how to farm them and their uses. Let’s start.
Placing and their interactions with other blocks
What’s so special about Lily Pads is that you can place them on top of water blocks. This makes walkng on the surface of liquid water possible (related topic: How to keep water from freezing in Minecraft?).
If the water block underneath a Lily Pad is removed or replaced, the Lily Pad will break and drop as an item.You can also place blocks on top of Lily Pads, they will look like they are floating on top of them:
They can also be placed on top of waterlogged blocks: waterlogging happens when non-full blocks (like Fence Gates or Ladders for example) are filled with a water source block.
Where to find them
Lily Pads naturally generate in Swamp biomes and in Wheat farm rooms inside Woodland Mansions, where they grow on top of water blocks.
You can also trade them with Villagers, but you can have a set of 2 for at least one Emerald, so it isn’t very convenient.
If you can’t find any Swamp, you can try to use the command /locate biome. You just need to open the commands and type:
/locate biome minecraft:swamp
And you’ll see a message appearing with the coordinates ot the closest Swamp.
If instead you want to get Lily Pads from a Mansion, you can open the commands and type:
/locate structure minecraft:mansion
Once again you’ll see a message with the coordinates of the closest Mansion.
Keep in mind that the structure of Woodland Mansions is randomly generated: you could end in a Mansion without the Wheat farm and therefore no Lily Pads. So if you just want Lily Pads you’d better search for a Swamp.
Can you farm Lily Pads?
Lily Pads doesn’t reproduce, you can’t plant their seeds to get more of them, like you can do with many other Minecraft plants and vegetables. The only way to gather an “infinite” amount of Lily Pads is through fishing. Lily Pads are one of the items that you can catch from water by using a Fishing Rod.
To craft a Fishing Rod you will need 3 Sticks and 2 Strings. You can get Strings as loot by killing Spiders. When you have all the ingredients, put them together in a Crafting Table:
To get the most out of your Fishing Rod, you can enchant it with Lure. The Lure enchantment increases the rate of fish biting your hook. With “fish bites” we just mean the movement that the Fishing Rod does when you catch something while fishing, which can can be some kind of fish but also various other items (like for example an Ink Sac or an Enchanted Book).
Keep in mind that Lily Pads are considered junk items on Minecraft Java version and they are considered treasure items on the Bedrock edition. This means that if you want to increase the chances of fishing a Lily Pad on the Bedrock edition, you can enchant your fishing Rod with the Luck of the Sea enchantment, which increases the chances to find a treasure.
If you want to know how to get both these enchantments (and basically all the enchantments in Minecraft), you can check the article How to get Silk Touch in Minecraft. The methods explained in that article will work for Lure and Luck of the Sea as well.
How to get it – commands
To get Lily Pads with commands, you will need to type the following line in the commands:
/give @p lily_pad 1
Depending on the version you are playing, you could need to use the following line instead:
/give @p waterlily 1 0
Then a Lily Pad will appear in your inventory. If you want more than 1, you just need to change the ‘1’ in the commands line with the amount that you would like to obtain.
Lily Pads uses
Being the only block that you can place on top of water, a Lily Pad can offer some unique features.
- You can use Lily Pads as a foundation for an island or a building in the middle of the ocean. Without Lily Pads you would have to start building from the ocean floor, but with Lily Pads you can just place the blocks on top of them (or underneath). Another solution for building in the middle of the sea is also pouring a Lava Bucket in the water, resulting in the formation of Cobblestone (related topic: How to have infinite Lava in Minecraft?).
- You can place various Lily Pads on a river or any other water body that separates you from your house or any of your buildings: they can be some kind of natural looking bridge. They can also be the bridge on ice rivers: if you walk on top of Lily Pads you will not slide, even if the Lily Pad is on top of an Ice block.
- A Lily Pad can also be very useful in Wheat farms or Pumpkin farms or any other crop that needs wet Farmland to grow into. Usually you would place water blocks in the middle of your crop field to keep the Farmland blocks wet: it can happen to fall into those water blocks while walking around. Nothing terrible, you just need to swim out of them, but it’s a nuisance that can be removed just by placing Lily Pads on top of the water blocks. This way you will be able to walk around your field without having to dodge the water blocks.
- Another practical use of a Lily Pad is as fuel for a Composter: placing a lily pad into a Composter has a 65% chance of raising the compost level by 1. Composters turn into Bone Meal many items, like various kinds of seeds, fruit and vegetables. You can check all the materials that you can place into a Composter here.
Conclusions
Lily Pads are very unique items: even if they are primarily decorative blocks, the fact that you can place them on top of water blocks opens a variety of different uses. The best way to acquire them is definitely by going to Swamps, but fishing can give you access to an illimited amount. Thank you very much for reading the article this far and I hope I’ll see you again around here. See you and take care!
