Block of the Month: Block of Lapis Lazuli

Every Minecraft player’s home is unique. Even amongst the low-effort dirt hut brigade, you’ll find diversity – some will go to the trouble of putting in windows, while others happily sit in the dark. Higher-class builders will opt for radically different styles – some skew medieval, others opt for minimalist, some just want to build an enormous dome out of slime blocks.

Me? Well, I’m not much of a builder. But there’s one block that I always appreciate when I take the effort to make it a feature of my constructions. One bright, brilliant, and oh-so-annoying-to-collect block. It’s lapis lazuli, and it’s our block of the month!

Lapis lazuli has been part of the strata of the Overworld since Java Edition beta 1.2, released in January 2011. Despite lacking a fancy name, this update added plenty of crucial things to the game, including bonemeal, sandstone, charcoal and squid – and, yes, blocks of lapis lazuli.

You won’t find these blocks very often in the wild – in fact, the only place where they’ve been seen is in woodland mansions, at the core of the creepy statues of illagers that you’ll find inside. Break those statues apart and you’ll likely come across the treasure you seek!

The easier option is to go mining. Dig up nine lapis lazuli by breaking a handful of lapis lazuli ore, and combine them in a crafting grid to get a block. Want lots of blocks? Well, you’ll need to do a lot of digging, but it’s also possible to find lapis in treasure chests, and cleric villagers sometimes have some for trading.

While lapis lazuli is a handy ingredient for enchanting and as a dye, the blocks aren’t quite as useful – except as a store for the original lapis. What they are good for, though, is decoration – the deep royal blue of a lapis lazuli block adds a special something to almost any build.

Outside of Minecraft, lapis lazuli is a type of rock formed under extreme conditions deep within the Earth’s crust, which since ancient times has been valued for its beautiful and intense color. It was first used by humans about six or seven thousand years ago, and it’s most famously seen in the funeral mask of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun.

The blue in lapis comes from a mineral called “lazurite”. The reason it looks so blue is complex, but imagine you had a tiny room constantly filling up with lots of balls of different colors. Now imagine you don’t like the blue ones, so you toss them all out of the window. Someone looking from the outside would only see blue balls, and so would assume that there are only blue balls in the room. That’s kinda like how lazurite acts with light – it holds onto all the different colors in light except for the blue, which it reflects back out, making the mineral appear blue.

As I noted when I wrote about lapis lazuli back in 2019, we don’t dig up very much lapis any more – it’s much easier to make it synthetically. It’s most often used as a dye or pigment, or for making jewelry. But in Minecraft? You’ll definitely want to keep a stock on hand for your enchanting experiments. And what better way to store it than as a beautiful block?