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When you play Minecraft, it’s essential to have a sense of adventure. You can go out in search of different villages, supplies, or other players. Since you can wander off pretty much endlessly in any direction, it’s no surprise that you might end up getting lost as you play.
You may retrace your steps back to where you came from if you have a decent sense of direction and can use landmarks to guide you, but your memory can prove to be inaccurate, or you might find that you don’t have a good sense of direction at all.
Does this mean you’re lost forever? Not necessarily. This is where the Minecraft compass comes in handy.
What Is A Minecraft Compass?
A Minecraft compass works similarly to a real-life compass. Just as a real-life compass has a needle which always points in the direction of the magnetic north pole, a Minecraft compass will always point toward the world’s spawn point. You don’t even have to have the item in your hand.
No matter where the compass is located – whether it is in your hand, on the ground, in your inventory, or anywhere else – it will always point toward the world’s spawn point.
The Minecraft compass is a great tool to help you get the most out of your Minecraft adventures and prevent you from getting lost along the way, or at least help you find where you are if you happen to get lost.
How To Use A Minecraft Compass
If you’ve ever used a compass in real life, using the Minecraft compass should be rather intuitive. The needle of a Minecraft compass always points to the world’s spawn point, and this will help you a lot if you are a person who is not great with direction or if you tend to travel far from the spawn point during your in-game adventures.
As mentioned before, the Minecraft compass mimics the traditional compass that you might have come across in real life, which has a needle that always points to magnetic north. However, just as a real-life compass can sometimes become inaccurate, especially when exposed to another magnetized object, so can a Minecraft compass.
In Minecraft, upon entering either The Nether or The End, your compass will spin erratically and point any which way, rendering it completely useless in these areas during the entirety of your visit. Once you leave these areas of the game, though, the compass will revert to its normal level of functioning.
Since the Minecraft compass traditionally only points to the world spawn point rather than to a spawn point set by sleeping, many users have felt that they have no other choice than to set up their base near the world spawn point if they ever want to find their way back with the compass.
However, if you don’t mind taking advantage of Commands, it’s actually unnecessary to set up your base near the world’s spawn point at all for the compass to be able to help you.
Commands And The Minecraft Compass
With the addition of Commands, alternatively known as Cheats, users can enter text in the chat that correlates to the action that they want to make in the game. These Commands make actions happen automatically that would not have happened during normal, unassisted gameplay.
In order to take advantage of Commands, you need to ensure that Cheats are turned on in your settings. Keep in mind that when you enable Cheats, you are also disabling achievements in the process. Now, you might rightfully wonder what Commands or Cheats have to do with the Minecraft compass.
The answer to this is that by using Commands, you can actually change the world’s spawn point to whatever you’d like it to be, which will make the compass so much more useful if you don’t have your base set up near the world’s spawn point. All you have to do is open the chat and type “/setworldspawn,” and the new world spawn will be set automatically.
Users typically try to set the spawn near their base to easily get back to it after they have strayed from it, but of course, you are free to use this feature of the game however you want.
Many users prefer to play the game unassisted, using no cheats at all, which is okay too. If that’s what you would prefer, feel free to ignore this advice on Commands entirely. Using Commands isn’t for everyone, but it is an option for those who want to personalize their Minecraft experience just a little bit more and make the most out of the limitations of the Minecraft compass.
How To Get A Minecraft Compass
To use a Minecraft compass, it’s important to know how to get one in the first place. There are three different ways that a user can get a compass for their inventory.
Natural Generation
The first way you can get a Minecraft compass may be as simple as finding one. Compasses can be found within nearly 8% of shipwreck chests and nearly 11% of stronghold library chests. If you’re playing the Bedrock Edition of Minecraft, compasses can be found in about 10.5% of stronghold library chests.
Finding a compass is probably the easiest way to get one, but this method relies a lot on chance. If you find one this way, that’s great, but you would probably be better off having a plan set in place to ensure that you end up with a compass if that’s a goal you have in your Minecraft gameplay.
Trading
Another way to get a Minecraft compass is by trading goods for it. You can obtain a single compass from a librarian villager for anywhere from 10 to 12 emeralds. The trading system uses a tier system, and a compass is one of the tier 2 trades.
Crafting
Yet another way to get a compass is by making one yourself by using the crafting table. You need four pieces of Iron Ingot and one piece of Redstone Dust to make a compass from scratch. It might take a little bit more time overall than some of the other methods, but overall, crafting a compass is the only sure way that you will get one.
What Can You Make With A Compass?
Now that you have a compass, what else can you do with it? Interestingly enough, you can do much more than simply find the world’s spawn point by means of the compass. As with virtually any item you can come across in Minecraft, there is so much more you can create by using a compass on the crafting table, and there’s so much more that you can obtain by trading a compass for maps.
The Minecraft compass is a gateway to a variety of other items.
Crafting
You can craft an extremely useful item by using a compass – a map. To do this, you will need to have a compass and eight pieces of paper on the crafting table. This will create a blank map. Maps are always blank at first, but over time they will fill up with information about the location as you travel around the Minecraft world.
This map is called an “Empty Locator Map” or an “Empty Map” when it first shows up in your inventory.
If you’re using the Bedrock Edition of Minecraft, you can then add the empty map and yet another compass onto the crafting table to make a map with a location marker on it. Basic maps don’t show you where you are automatically.
Trading
If you want to trade your compass for something else, you can get a single emerald for it if you sell it to a cartographer villager.
If you want to obtain an Ocean Explorer Map or a Woodland Explorer Map, a compass is part of the cost, along with a hefty amount of emeralds. To get an Ocean Explorer Map from a cartographer, you will need to hand over one compass and anywhere from 12 to 20 emeralds. If you would like to get a Woodland Explorer Map, the cost is a single compass and anywhere from 16 to 28 emeralds.
Conclusion
A compass is a very important item in Minecraft. A compass can be used to make maps, traded for emeralds and explorer maps, or simply be used help you get back to the world’s spawn point. Using a compass alone might not always be the most helpful thing, especially if your base is further away from the world’s spawn point than you might like it to be. Luckily, this is nothing a little cheat or a map can’t fix.
Now that you have a little more information on how a Minecraft compass works and what you can do with it, you can get back to playing Minecraft with an extra dose of knowledge about compasses to help guide you as you play. Just add the compass to your hotbar, and you’ll see the red arrow pointing you to your spawn.