How To Use A Beacon! ▫ The Minecraft Survival Guide (Tutorial Lets Play) [Part 54]

Hello everyone my name is pixel refs and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide if you guys are having a great day today’s episode is going to be all about the wonderful block currently residing in my right hand yes that’s right folks we’re gonna do an episode about beacons

Immediately after the episode in which we fought the wither and so if you want to see how a beacon is constructed you will need to go back and watch that episode because it needs a nether star which we acquire from defeating the wither 3 obsidian and 5 glass to create

A beacon house Sun is going down so I’m gonna be a little bit wary of the amount of time I’m spending out here but when you place a beacon down in the world like this you’ll notice that it doesn’t really do all that much there’s no

Lights no sounds it doesn’t seem to be turned on and when you have this interface open there are no effects currently active you can’t put anything in here and activate it it doesn’t work that way now when you pick up a beacon you can’t actually pick it up with

Anything including just punching it with your hand and it will break slower than most blocks even if you’re using a haste efficiency pickaxe but it’s still safe to pick up without the use of any kind of tools so bear that in mind because a lot of people think that you need to

Have like a diamond pickaxe to break it or something like that it just breaks slowly it’s very safe to do but in order to activate them beacons require the use of resource blocks which are blocks of iron gold diamonds or emeralds and we’ve been preparing our resources for those

That’s not all of the iron I have the rest of the iron is up here in my iron family would be going to grab that in just a second but I’ve got a little bit of gold a little bit of diamond and quite a lot of emeralds so we’ve got a

Decent amount of resources here that we can convert into resource blocks I remember to do that you need nine of the resource in question so in this case we’re going to be making 23 blocks of iron out of what we’ve got here let’s see how much gold we have this is

Probably going to be the least okay we’ve got 13 of those that’s not so bad diamonds we’re probably not going to use in the beacon for too long but we may as well have them here as an example 24 not bad and emeralds we can probably convert a whole lot of

These into emerald blocks we’ve got a stack and more fantastic stuff been doing a lot of training with villages in this world there we go and we’ve got 64 and 22 now let’s head up to the iron farm and see what we can add to that number here we go

Small like it’s okay uh I think I should probably do to broader shelcha box or something like that let’s put the crafting table down here and see if we can craft some of this into iron blocks yes that’s more like it folks now cooking with gas okay that is in fact

Almost enough we just need a few more blocks of iron oh look and more is being produced as we speak fantastic stuff okay that should be enough right so let’s talk about the requirements for each tier of beacon because beacons can be made in up to four tiers which

Increases the amount of effects you get from the beacon let’s swing down here and actually let’s set this up over here in the quarry because this will become very very useful for the quarry in the near future so let’s start off with these gold blocks as an example because

We’ve got the fewest of them by setting down a 3×3 square of these gold blocks and placing the beacon on top there we go it activates and we actually get the ring home the beacon advancement for that for activating the beacon for the first time it starts making this

Wonderful humming noise and this light actually travels all the way up to build height which is where it will stop but you yeah you get a beacon all the way up to build height now beacons require access to the sky in order to activate

If I put a block over the top of this even if it is above the start of the beacon beam itself if I do that like so it turns off and it will not be able to activate any of the powers it gets so you’ll need to restore sky access to it

In order for it to switch back on which you should do after a couple of seconds now you’ll notice when I open the beacons interface we have two powers available to us we have either speed or haste and speed we will activate right

Now I can put in let’s put in a an iron ingot because I apparently don’t have as much gold as I have iron there we go let’s put that in there activate speed and click done it’ll take a couple of seconds but your potions display up in the top right

Corner there we’ll register that you now have a speed buff and that speed buff is permanent within the range of the beaker while I’m within the radius of the beacon you’ll notice that it resets this speed duration every few seconds it kind of renews it each time it gets three

Seconds in and so you can expect it to take three seconds for the effects to activate when you come within range of the beacon that’s just how often it checks whether or not it is giving players within range that ability now if I get it far enough away from this

Beacon I think the range for a single tier beacon is only about twenty blocks if you go outside of that range you won’t any you won’t have the effect anymore so if I get up here for example if I get this far away that should be far enough away you’ll notice that the

Thing just keeps ticking down and then eventually the speed buff expires as soon as I step back within the range there we go speed buff takes effect again and we have ourselves a working speed beacon but of course you’ll notice that I don’t have access to the next set

Of powers until I add another layer to the beacon so we’re actually going to take this all down in favour of putting the beacon back up with two tiers now for the second tier we are going to use our diamond blocks and it turns out I’m

Not quite as rich as I thought I was because I don’t have enough diamond blocks to complete this second tier here so you can actually mix and match a resource blocks it doesn’t matter which blocks you use here as long as you use a decent solid area of resource blocks if

I were to take out any of these blocks it wouldn’t count as a full tier for the beacon so let’s pop all of the resource blocks we need in there pop the beacon on there and it’s going to activate within a couple of seconds and there we

Go we have tier 2 which has unlocked resistance and a jump boost let’s put jump boost on as an example notice that this is just jump boost 1 and jump boost 2 does become available if we have a secondary power to activate but that’s not until we get a full tier

4 beacon which is not gonna happen for a little while but now once the jump boost activates we will have a little bit more of a spring in our step will be a little bit more bouncy and now we’ll be able to jump up not to full blocks but a block and a

Half I really wish I have a slab on me to demonstrate this but look I can’t quite get up two blocks there but you’ll notice that I am jumping a little bit higher than usual and I can get up about one and a half blocks it also

Makes it ever so slightly easier to activate my lighter from a single jump because then I can just kind of jump a block and a half and then glide a little bit there we go so most of these effects are fairly self-explanatory speed will give you a boost of speed jump boost

Will give you a boost of jump her resistance will boost your defense and haste increases your mining speed if we activate haste we will actually mine the stone around us a little bit faster than usual and while that is a great effect it is haste – that is the most desirable

Of all of them and I’ll show you that in full detail in a minute but now we need to move on to the tier 3 beacon which is going to get us a boost of strength tier 3 beacon activate and this time I’ve made the 3rd tier with emerald blocks

And like I said before you can mix and match these materials it doesn’t have to be a solid tier of emerald blocks I’m just happy that I’ve got that many in the first place but this is a 7×7 area completely filled in with emerald blocks

This is a 5 by 5 so that’s 25 diamond blocks and 49 emerald blocks right here along with these 9 gold blocks actually 10 gold blocks if you count the one in the middle there but this will give us access to the strength effect now to activate strength 2 we would have to

Activate a tier 4 beacon but this will give us a permanent strength buff allowing us to deal a little bit more damage much in the same way that a strength potion would if we’re fighting any mobs in the area and with each tier we add the effective range of the beacon

Effect will actually increase you’ll notice earlier on I said that this top tier here just gave us a 20-block range for the effect of the beacon well this one here adding a second tier will give us an additional 10 blocks on top of that which means we have a 30-block

Radius adding tier 3 will give us a 40 block radius meaning that this strength buff will not deplete even if I get 40 blocks away from the beacon where it is right now which I’m going to have to do unfortunately because I need to go and sleep it’s getting a little bit dark

Around here and much so I want to demonstrate the strength buff I would much rather not have to deal with mobs tonight but as I come back into the quarry you will notice that the strength effect comes back in much sooner I’m not even inside the quarry yet and

Already we’re getting that strength effect from the beacon it was probably even a few blocks earlier but it just takes a few seconds to actually kick in in the first place so that is a tier 3 beacon giving us access to strength now how about this tier 4 beacon tier 4 beacon

Activate and this is made entirely with iron blocks and we are achieved the beacon ater goal for getting a full-power beacon together this is a total of 164 resource blocks 164 iron blocks I haven’t used any of the gold or diamonds or emeralds this time we can

Build the entire thing out of iron and now do you see why I wanted an iron farm before we fought the wither because being able to set one of these things up immediately after we fought the weather is an absolute blessing we’re about to do some very very cool stuff using

Beacons and now with the tier 4 beacon we have access to a 50 block effect range and we can choose any of these effects and either an enhanced version of that effect so speed resistance haste jump boost or strength – or we can have that effect plus a regeneration effect

Effectively just like drinking a regeneration potion constantly being able to renew your health while you’re in the effective range of the beacon which as I mentioned before is 50 blocks or so it’s kind of nice to have these scattered throughout your base providing you with either a boost of speed and

Some regenerative effects to make sure that you get fully healed up when you get home or even a little bit of extra resistance if you plan on fighting mobs throughout the night and there are some fantastic applications for that I’ve seen people set these up on top of

Guardian temples and then raid the ocean temple with a resistance and a regeneration effect or some extra speed and it is absolutely incredible how quickly you can tear through guardians when you don’t have to worry about them damaging you all the time even the strength buff or adding strength to can

Really help when you’re fighting the wither again if you set up a beacon in the area nearby although obviously you have to worry about the beacon or any of the materials used to create the beacon being destroyed by the wither so make sure you place that very very carefully

But I think the thing that draws people to beacons most is this haste to this effect is possibly the single most important thing in endgame minecraft when it comes to resource acquisition and building so let me activate the haste effect and let me show you the difference between mining without haste

And mining with it now this is going to be a bit of a test of the two pickaxes we have right now because right now I’m using my silk touch pickaxe which only has efficiency 4 and right here I have my fortune pickaxe which has efficiency 5 now you’ll notice the

Difference haste allows you to mine a lot quicker than you normally do and you’ll notice that the pickaxe is kind of flailing around in my hand but the difference isn’t all that noticeable when you’re using an efficiency 4 tool it’s still fast but it’s not as fast as

It could be it’s not as fast as say a shovel breaking dirt it’s not as fast as using an efficiency pickaxe on netherrack when it comes to breaking stone over here it doesn’t really seem all that different to just using an efficiency for pickaxe without a haste

To beacon then we switched to efficiency 5 and we can break stone instantly in much the same way we can collect sand or gravel with a shovel or sand stone with a pickaxe and suddenly our quarry is an incredibly efficient thing I can generate absolute tons of cobblestone

Instantly and even find new caves that I didn’t realize were here the combination of haste 2 and efficiency 5 on your pickaxe allows you to instantly mine stone and any kind of variants of stone like granite and the site and diorite and this is why you will find a lot of

People tend to rush the end game in order to get hold of a beacon and haste to before they even do any building in their worlds because this is pretty much it this is the fastest you can acquire resources in the game is is instantly mining stuff like this and from now on

If we end up in chanting our silk touch pickaxe with efficiency 5 I just need to combine that with an efficiency for book I’ll be able to collect enough stone to build something huge in just a matter of minutes once you have haste and efficiency 5 on

Your pickaxe you can just strafe and dig out three lines of stone like this pretty much instantaneously it makes taking down the walls of this quarry an absolute breeze and stone is not necessarily the only thing you can use this into the mining effect for it’s

Also possible to do this with stuff like terracotta out in the Mesa you can gather a huge amount of that using one of these beacons which is why I haven’t gathered even more terracotta from the mesas because I was waiting to bring one of these with me and it’s a good thing

We’ve now acquired these beacons because I was this close to running out of stone and stone brick on the iron farm project I have almost nothing left in that regard so and however I’ve got this and I’m able to set up my beacon basically anywhere I want

I can harvest smooth stone for days it’s going to be glorious of course a beacon does require you to sacrifice an iron or gold ingot a diamond or an emerald any time you want to switch the effect so you better make pretty sure you know which effect you want before

You switch the machine on in the first place the same applies if you want to take this beacon and move it elsewhere or replace it or take out any of the blocks from this pyramid it’s going to deactivate the beacon effect you had before and you’re going to need to throw

In another resource in there if you want to to reset it again but as long as it detects this formation of blocks underneath it you can power any number of beacons so in fact if I wanted to add another beacon to this setup I could

Place it next to the first one and all I would need to do would be to extend each of these tears by a set number of blocks on each site so that would be tier two of that next beacon already set up just by adding a few more iron blocks to it

So if you sandwich these guys together you can actually have a bunch of beacon effects in the same place at once of course provided that you fought the wither and got another nether start to make another beacon in the first place now this isn’t the only fun thing you

Can do with beacons I brought a little bit of stained glass with me to show this off because this is something actually really really cool if you place a piece of stained glass above the beacon beam it will actually change the color of the beam to reflect whatever

Color of glass that is and that does not just count this block here either if I pillar up using one of my iron blocks here and place some white stained glass on top of that you can actually place a glass pane within the bounding box of the beacon beam and you’ll notice that

From there on upwards it changes color but it does it in a very subtle way so that beam is still emitting blue but it’s just been brightened a little bit by the white and if I remove that using my oops that was my fortune pickaxe oh dear well I’m not getting that glass

Pane back I better switch to the silk touch one to get rid of that there we go and that completely brightens it up again now if I pop the the white glass paint in there you’ll notice it doesn’t really have too much of an effect on the

Beam itself but if I add a blue glass pane in there oops there we go it basically does the same thing except it makes it a little bit more blue this time and you can make beams segmented that way by having the glass pane or glass block placed further up in the

Beacon beams so you can create a whole variety of effects with this and the colors can be altered very subtly if you want to transition beacons from say red to yellow but you want to go through orange in the meantime you can put red and yellow glass together you can come

Buying them in any combination and have very different colors of beacon beam it’s it’s actually possible to create a full spectrum of colors with these things not to mention being able to sort of brighten or darken them with white or black stained glass so it’s really possible to create a nice variety of

Effects with these and personalize the beacons to the specific area for example if you’re working on a kind of dark and spooky biome you might want to put a piece of black stained glass above a beacon you want in the area so that you still get the effect but the effect is a

Little bit more spooky or like a red beacon beam for an area that’s kind of inspired by the nether and has netherrack and lava everywhere but if you think I’m kidding about how far away you can see that beacon beam I’m now stood on top of the iron farm and you

Can see it stretching all the way to build height and even from this distance away that beacon beam really shines very very clearly so you can use these for signals you can use them for all sorts of stuff and if they’re even quite good for orienting yourself so you know which

Way to head if you want to go home but if you want my opinion the most important thing I need a beacon for is that haste to effect and it is absolutely superb for strip mining let’s take this down to Diamond level around y11 and set it up and see how many

Diamonds we can get in about half an hour’s work [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] You welcome back folks so if you enjoyed the time-lapse and it’s a good thing I decided to limit this to only half an hour because my silk touch pickaxe is very low on durability right now I need to go and mend this thing at my XP farm

As soon as possible but this whole area was cleared out in just 30 minutes and is actually now a deathtrap because I didn’t bring a huge amount of torches and I was being a little bit frugal about the places I was lighting up so hopefully that came across okay on

The time-lapse but things things tend to get a little bit dark when I’ve got the shaders enabled for those things but in the meantime we have gathered so much stone I mean if you remember how much that stone that we gathered from the quarry in about 45 minutes I got maybe

Like a little bit over half a chest maybe like close to a double chest of of stone and now I have a chest and a half plus all of this cobblestone plus all of these stone types and gravel and extra dirt and all of these resources that’s 30 diamond door blocks which doesn’t

Seem like much for a space this size but there could be diamond door lurking behind any of these walls and to be honest I wasn’t even going for strip-mining gonna for the diamonds I was here for the stone in the first place but here we go we’ve got a lovely

Amount of resources here that we can 14 we’ve got a bunch of redstone coal and lapis and so forth it’s all gonna be pretty good but now we have a beacon mine set up I can come down here any time I want to and get a bunch more

Stone for building projects and that means not only that we have a really great way of getting resources but we have a great way of acquiring materials to build with and that’s gonna be the focus of some of the future episodes coming up later this month we’re gonna

Start a big building project in the plains over by the windmill and that’s gonna be really great I hope you guys are looking forward to that but that’s gonna be it for this episode thank you so much for watching the Minecraft Survival Guide my name has been pixel

Rifts don’t forget to leave a like on this episode if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and I’ll see you guys soon take care bye for now [Applause] you