Brewing Stand

Brewing Stand is where potions are made, and its most useful property is that one ingredient is consumed no matter how many bottles sit underneath it. Brewing a single bottle costs the same nether wart, the same blaze powder, and the same wait as brewing a full set of three, so there is never a reason to run one half empty.

Learning how to use a brewing stand is really learning an order. Water bottles go in the lower slots, blaze powder in the fuel slot at the side, and nether wart first, to make the awkward base that almost every useful potion is built on. The effect ingredient goes in next — a golden carrot, a spider eye, a ghast tear — and only after that come the modifiers: redstone extends duration, glowstone strengthens the effect, and the two are mutually exclusive. Gunpowder converts a finished potion into a throwable splash version, and dragon's breath turns a splash potion into a lingering cloud.

Fermented spider eye is the odd one out. It corrupts a finished potion into its opposite, which is how healing becomes harming and swiftness becomes slowness, and it is the only route to several potions you cannot brew from scratch.

A single blaze powder covers twenty brewing cycles, and since blaze rods break down into blaze powder, one trip to a Nether fortress supplies both the stand and its fuel indefinitely. Stands also generate ready-made in end ships and in igloo basements, and that basement stand comes with a splash potion of Weakness already brewed — which, together with the golden apple in the chest beside it, is exactly the kit for curing a zombie villager.