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This post was last updated on March 1, 2026
Blue ice is a specific type of ice block in Minecraft with unique properties. While it is similar to packed ice blocks, its exact mechanics differ from most types of ice, giving it a range of useful functions.
This guide tells you everything you need to know about blue ice – including where you can find it, how to make it, how exactly it works, and more!
What Is Minecraft Blue Ice
Blue ice is a unique type of solid ice block in Minecraft. Being an ice block, it is slippery and fragile, although it does have several different mechanics to ice and packed ice blocks.
Minecraft Blue Ice Features
- Blue ice can be crafted, or found in nature.
- Blue ice is more slippery than standard ice blocks. Blue ice has a slippery nature factor of 0.989, whereas ice blocks and packed ice have a slipperiness of 0.98. This makes blue ice the block with the lowest friction in the game.
- Blue ice blocks don’t get melted by light sources – although normal ice blocks do.
- Blue ice blocks will drop nothing unless mined with a silk touch enchanted item.
- Blue ice can be used as a basalt generator – if flowing lava occupies a space next to blue ice and above soul sand, it generates basalt. This can be used as an infinite source of basalt.
- Blue ice can produce light (only in the bedrock edition and education edition).
- Blue ice increases the speed of a water current above.
- It increases boat movement speed.
The slippery factor of blue ice means items, entities, and players all slide across them due to lower friction.
How to Use Blue Ice in Minecraft
There are several cool uses for blue ice based on its unique properties
- For building and decoration
- Increasing the speed of water currents
- Making special roads that let you travel faster
- As a basalt farm, or basalt bridge (check out this tutorial video for a full idea)
- As a light source
How to Get Blue Ice in Minecraft
If you want to get your hands on this type of block, you can either craft blue ice, or find it in certain biomes.
Check out these step-by-step instructions to learn how to find or make blue ice.
How to Make Blue Ice Minecraft
Crafting blue ice in Minecraft is relatively straightforward, although you will need to collect a lot of standard ice per block – so sometimes it’s easier to try to find it rather than create it.
The ingredients to craft a single blue ice block are a total of 81 regular ice blocks.
To craft one blue ice block, the crafting recipe requires nine packed ice blocks – one placed in each square of a crafting table.
To create a packed ice block, you need to place nine ice blocks on your crafting table.
Because ice is the raw ingredient, you need a pickaxe with the Silk Touch enchantment, otherwise, the ice block won’t spawn when you break it.
Follow these steps to create your blue ice block.
- Enchant a pickaxe with the Silk Touch enchantment.
- Find a biome with many blocks of ice – a glacier, tundra, or frozen ocean will be fine.
- Mine a total of 81 regular ice blocks.
- Craft nine packed ice blocks with from the regular ice (1 ice block in each crafting grid square).
- Now put one packed ice into each crafting grid square. These packed ice blocks can then be crafted into a single piece of blue ice.
Because of the huge amount of regular ice needed to make a single blue ice block, it might be easier to find packed ice (or blue ice) in the wild, rather than try to create it all from standard ice.
Where to Find Blue Ice
Blue ice is a relatively rare block to track down, although if you find the right biomes then you can often mine it in large quantities. Because you need to search for standard ice to make these blocks anyway, finding the nearest ice biome is going to be essential.
Note – you will need a silk touch enchanted pickaxe to be able to pick up these blocks.
You can find blue ice generates naturally in the following locations
- In Frozen Ocean Biomes
- At the bottom of icebergs
- As large arching structures and ice spikes in this icy biome
- Snowy tundra villages
- Ancient cities
You can also find blue ice as chest loot in Snowy tundra villages – with a 9.9% drop chance.
Wandering Traders also sometimes sell blue ice. 1 block costs 6 emeralds, and the traders have a 16% chance of selling a block of blue ice.
Frozen Ocean biomes are the best place to look for ice, packed ice, and blue ice in Minecraft survival mode. If you can find one of these biomes then you should have no problem collecting a huge amount of any ice you want.
These biomes can rare, but the key is to keep exploring your world until you find a cold climate. As soon as you find a snowy biome, then there is a high chance that you will be close to a frozen ocean.
You can identify frozen oceans by their large blue ice sturctures, glaciers, icebergs, and of course, the icy ocean iteself.
Whenever I’m trying to find a specific biome in Minecraft survival mode, I like to use a seed mapper like chunkbase.com.
Some people might say it’s a bit cheaty – but hey, do you really want to waste hours searching for a biome when you can instantly find out where they are with a seed mapper.
Commands for Blue Ice
In creative mode, or if you have cheats/commands enabled in your Minecraft server you can easily spawn blue ice blocks into your inventory with the following chat command.
- “/Give blue_ice ” followed by the number you want to spawn.
What Versions of Minecraft Have Blue Ice
You can find blue ice in the following versions of Minecraft.
- Minecraft Pocket Edition (PE)
- Minecraft Windows 10 Edition
- Minecraft Education Edition
- Minecraft Xbox One
- Minecraft PS4
Conclusion
As you’ve learned in this guide, blue ice can be a pretty useful block to have around. Although they can also be a bit of a pain to get hold of – partially due to needing a silk touch enchanted tool, and because they need a huge amount of raw ice to craft.
Personally, I recommend finding and mining blue ice, rather than trying to craft it all from regular and packed ice!
FAQs
Is Blue Ice Rare Minecraft?
Blue ice is relatively rare in Minecraft, although ultimately it depends on what biome you are in. Sure, you’re not going to find any blue ice in a desert or jungle, but you should be able to find plenty of blue ice blocks (and regular ice blocks) in cold ocean biomes.
Is Packed Ice Faster than Blue Ice?
Packed ice is not faster than blue ice. Blue ice has a slipperiness factor of 0.989, whereas packed ice blocks are only 0.98. This means blue ice has less friction, meaning it can give items and entities higher speeds.
