Minecraft 1.17: How to Craft and Use Candles

Minecraft has no shortage of lighting methods, but the new candles added to the game have the most variety out of all the options currently available.

Added with the 1.17 Caves and Cliffs update, the long-awaited addition of candles has finally made its way to the game with 17 unique colors and four possible arrangements. In this guide, we’ll show you how to craft, dye, and most importantly, how to light a candle.

How to Craft and Use Candles in Minecraft

Minecraft: How to Craft a Candle

Candles in Minecraft are fairly cheap to make, requiring only two items. You will need a single piece of string, plus a honeycomb. Place the string overtop the honeycomb in a crafting table or in your inventory to create one candle. This candle will be a mix of white and yellow in color by default.

Getting the items required to make a candle is quite simple.

String can be attained by killing spiders, who will drop between zero and five string, or by killing cats, who will drop zero to two. It can also be traded for, looted from naturally spawning chests in dungeons, mineshafts, or temples, and it can also be fished.

Honeycombs on the other hand, are gotten by shearing bees nests. Much like how honeycombs are used to wax copper blocks, it acts as the wax of the candle when crafting.

Minecraft: How to Change Candle Color

If you’d like a different color than that ugly yellowish white for your candle, then you can change it by dying it. This is done similar to how you would change firework colors, by combining any one of the 16 dye colors with the candle in a crafting table, or in your inventory.

Dyes are attained largely from flowers, which can be placed in your inventory to get a dye of that respective color. You can also smelt cacti or sea pickles in furnaces to get green and lime green dye.  

Minecraft: How to Use a Candle

Now that you know how to craft one, you now need to know how to light a candle. This is rather simple. Place a candle, then use flint and steel to light it. This will stay permanently lit unless manually extinguished, or if it comes in contact with water. A single candle will give off a light level of three, which is not enough to stop monsters from spawning, as most spawn between light levels four and seven. 

Similar to sea pickles, multiple candles can be placed on a single block, up to a maximum of four. The way their arrangement appears is dependent on the number of candles on the block, as is their light level.

Each additional candle ups the block’s light level by three, up to a maximum of 12. For comparison, regular torches have light levels of 14. Extinguishing a candle is as easy as interacting with it, and destroying a candle can be done with any tool or with your bare hands, much like a torch. 

Minecraft: How to Make a Birthday Cake

There’s one more cool thing you can do with these new candles. Place down a cake, then interact with it while holding a candle to place it in the cake. Lighting this is done in the exact same way as a regular candle, and can be done to create a birthday cake.

While this doesn’t serve any real purpose other than decoration, and can only hold a single candle, it’s still a really neat centerpiece for your dining area. If the cake is eaten or destroyed, the candle will be dropped.

Now that you know how to craft, and how to light a candle in Minecraft, you can get right to spicing up your home base with this brand new design piece. Torches are still the item of choice for lighting up caves and the outdoors, as they’re cheaper, but candles are clearly better for interior design.

If you found this guide helpful, consider taking a look at our other Minecraft guides here on GameSkinny.