How to Make a Lantern in Minecraft (8 Iron Nuggets)

To make a lantern in Minecraft, open a crafting table and put one torch in the centre square, then fill all eight surrounding squares with iron nuggets. That gives you one lantern. It emits light level 15 — the brightest in the game — and can either sit on top of a block or hang from the underside of one.

The recipe is the easy part. Most players looking up how to make a lantern in Minecraft get stuck one step earlier, on the iron nuggets, because nuggets are not something you mine. They come from breaking an iron ingot down, and nine nuggets is a whole ingot's worth.

Lanterns have been in the game since Java Edition 1.14, and nothing about the base recipe has changed since. What has changed is that you now have three lanterns to choose between, which the sections below cover.

How to make a lantern in Minecraft

1. Get at least one iron ingot. One ingot crafts into nine iron nuggets, which is one more than a lantern needs.

2. Open a crafting table. The 2×2 grid in your inventory will not work here — the lantern needs all nine slots of a 3×3 grid.

3. Place the iron ingot anywhere in the grid on its own. It returns nine iron nuggets. Pick those up.

4. Place one torch in the centre square of the crafting grid.

5. Fill the remaining eight squares with one iron nugget each — top row, middle left and right, and the whole bottom row.

6. Drag the lantern out of the result slot. One craft gives one lantern, so repeat the whole sequence for each extra one you want.

If you want to hang the lantern in mid-air rather than tuck it under a ceiling block, craft a chain as well: one iron ingot with two iron nuggets, stacked vertically, gives one chain. Chains and lanterns snap together visually, and you can run as many chain blocks as you like between the ceiling and the light.

Where the iron nuggets come from

Crafting an ingot down is the cheap route, but it is not the only one. Smelting any iron tool, weapon or piece of iron or chainmail armour in a furnace also returns iron nuggets, and durability and enchantments make no difference — a nearly broken iron pickaxe smelts just as well as a fresh one. That makes a chest of worn-out iron gear a reasonable nugget supply.

Nuggets also generate in chests. Shipwreck chests carry them very often, ruined portals and bastion remnants fairly often, and taiga village houses occasionally. Piglins will sometimes hand over a stack of nuggets when bartered with a gold ingot, though that is one of the rarer barter outcomes and not something to plan around.

If you are short on iron in the first place, the constraint is the ore, not the recipe — it is worth knowing which Y levels iron actually spawns at before you start digging.

Soul lanterns and copper lanterns

The same ring of eight iron nuggets around a soul torch makes a soul lantern instead. It burns with the blue soul flame, emits light level 10 rather than 15, and repels piglins — though not piglin brutes. Because 10 is below the threshold, a soul lantern will not melt snow or ice, which is useful if you are lighting a snowy build you want to keep snowy. The soul torch itself needs soul sand or soul soil, the same block that drives a bubble column water lift.

Copper lanterns arrived later, in Java Edition 1.21.9 and Bedrock 1.21.111, and follow the same shape with copper parts: eight copper nuggets around one copper torch. A copper lantern also emits light level 15, and its oxidation stage makes no difference to that — a fully oxidised, teal-green copper lantern is exactly as bright as a fresh one. If you want it to stay the colour it started, wax it with honeycomb.

What a lantern does not do

A lantern is not a sea lantern. Sea lanterns are a separate block made from prismarine shards and crystals, and no amount of iron will get you one.

A lantern also will not stop mobs spawning everywhere nearby just because it is bright. Light level 15 at the source still falls off by one per block, so a single lantern covers its immediate surroundings and nothing more — a large room needs several, spaced out.

And unlike a torch, a lantern is waterloggable. You can place one in water and it stays lit, which a torch cannot do.

Common questions

Can I use a redstone torch or a soul torch interchangeably? No. A redstone torch is not a valid lantern ingredient at all. A soul torch is valid but makes a soul lantern, not a regular one — the game treats them as two different recipes.

Does the lantern hang on its own? It needs something above it to hang from, or something below it to sit on. A lantern cannot float unsupported in mid-air; if the block it is attached to is broken, the lantern drops as an item.

Does the recipe differ between Java and Bedrock? No. Eight iron nuggets around one torch works the same on both.

If the recipe isn't working

Nearly every failed lantern craft comes down to one of three things: using the 2×2 inventory grid instead of a crafting table, using iron ingots in place of nuggets, or leaving one of the eight outer squares empty. The shape is fixed — a complete ring with the torch dead centre.

If the grid looks correct and still produces nothing, check the torch. Unlit redstone torches and soul torches both look vaguely torch-shaped in a crowded hotbar, and neither one will give you a standard lantern.