If you have mastered farming carrots and wheat, the next step in perfecting your Minecraft garden will be to start growing cocoa beans.
Having a vast farm can be very important in Minecraft as many of the crops that can be grown in the game don’t only help with your food supply, but many have alternative uses that you will need later in the game.
Cocoa beans are harder to come by, but they have uses in many recipes. Here’s a quick guide on how to grow cocoa beans in Minecraft.
Finding Cocoa Beans
Cocoa beans can only be found in jungle biomes. So to find cocoa beans, you need to find a jungle.
Jungle biomes are warm biomes that are quite uncommon, but once you do find them you are likely to stumble across a whole matter of jungle-exclusive items and plants, which you cannot find elsewhere.
Among them are melons, parrots, jungle trees, and most importantly, the cocoa pods.
Cocoa beans will be found in the form of cocoa pods which are growing from jungle trees. These hold your beans/seeds.
You will have to break the pods to get the beans, which you can then plant in your own garden.
A fully grown cocoa pod can give 2-3 cocoa beans.
Growing Cocoa Beans
Growing cocoa beans is entirely unique compared to growing any other crop.
Instead of growing them from the ground in farmland, you will need to use wood blocks to grow them. Cocoa beans can be planted on the side of jungle blocks and will grow from them into full cocoa pods.
It does not matter if the jungle log is simply a regular jungle log, a stripped log or jungle wood. The cocoa beans can be planted and still grow.
The block does not need to be part of a tree nor does it require any water or other conditions around it in order to grow. Your cocoa bean farm can be a bunch of floating blocks that grow cocoa beans if you want it to be so.
Crafting With Cocoa Beans
The most popular recipe that includes cocoa beans is the cookie recipe. A cookie is a food item that is popular for the way it looks, but not so much for the benefits it gives.
The majority of other recipes for cocoa beans can only be found in Minecraft’s Education Edition.
There, the cocoa beans are used in place of dye, mixed with different Education Edition-only crafting items to make other special items, such as brown balloons and brown glowsticks.
In the Java Edition, cocoa beans can be turned into brown dye and then used to dye various objects.
In the Bedrock and Education Edition, cocoa beans can be used directly to dye items brown. This means cocoa beans do not need to be made into brown dye to dye items like glass or beds.
What to Do Next
If you are interested in using cocoa beans as a dye and you are looking for something to dye, then consider looking into terracotta.
Making terracotta in Minecraft is simple and an easy way to decorate your builds by adding a lot of color to them. It’s not immediately obvious how to make terracotta, especially if you’re a newer player, but it’s worth looking into.
