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It's been years since Minecraft arrived on the scene and provided an in-depth hobby in the form of an online game. Even to this day, new takes on the core game are coming out while the community for the base model remains strong and active.

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Despite its simplistic look, there are many layers and aspects to the Minecraft experience. You can spend all your time adventuring, crafting, hunting, and just trying to live a virtual life in a world that is equal parts beauty and danger. A key mechanic is the different machines you can use to build and alter resources such as the handy-dandy Composter.

Updated May 12, 2023, by Sean Murray: Only in the world of Minecraft can you turn a baked potato into bone meal, but this is what you do if you want great crop yields. So we've refreshed this guide's formatting to be a little easier to read.

What's A Composter?

A Lone Composter In Nature

Much like its real-life counterpart, the Minecraft Composter is meant to be used for composting. By filling all the slots of the Composter, you can convert a variety of materials and resources into bone meal.

This is important since bone meal is necessary for creating dyes to add some color and flair to whatever structures and armor you're making. It's also very helpful in farming since it can be used as an effective fertilizer.

There are other ways to get bone meal like crafting them from bones using a Crafting Table, trading with the Wandering Trader, and looting them from various types of fish. However, the most reliable way is by using a Composter since that's its primary purpose.

In order to get the Composter to work efficiently, you'll need to fill it up until it's full. This can be achieved by stacking compostable items like vegetation and food and then collecting the bone meal once it's ready.

To create a Composter, you'll need at least seven wooden slabs arranged in a bin-like fashion on the Crafting Table. To make a wooden slab, you'll need wooden planks, which you can line up on the bottom row of the crafting screen. Lining up three wooden planks of the same type will yield a stack of six wooden slabs of that type.

Fortunately, you can use any combination of wooden slabs in order to make a Composter.

How To Use The Composter

Three Composters Gathered In A Field

Of all the tools that you can use in Minecraft, the Composter is one of the most gradual and demanding. In order for it to produce bone meal, you'll need to fill it up to seven layers of compostable items. However, not every type of plant or food yields the same amount of compost.

The lowest-value compostable items include very small and common things such as leaves, grass, seeds, roots, and berries. If you're planning to fill up the Composter with only these, you'll need more than 20.

Full-grown plants like cactuses, vines, produce, and fungus have a higher yield and only require over ten of them.

On the other hand, the most effective compostable items are fully-cooked foods such as baked potatoes, cookies, bread, cake, and pumpkin pie. Tossing any of those into the Composter has a higher chance to raise the compost layer and the whole thing be filled with just seven to eight of them.

NEXT: Minecraft: How To Dye Your Armor