Lightning Rod - Minecraft Block Guide | Properties, Recipe & Uses (2025)

What is Lightning Rod in Minecraft?

A lightning rod is a thin, metallic rod made of copper. Its main purpose is to protect your builds from lightning strikes during a thunderstorm. When lightning strikes near a lightning rod, it will redirect the lightning to hit the rod itself instead of the surrounding blocks. This is incredibly useful for protecting flammable builds, like wooden houses or wool sculptures, from catching on fire and burning down. It also has a secondary use as a redstone component, as it sends out a short redstone pulse when it is struck by lightning. It is a simple but very important block for keeping your creations safe from the weather.

How to get Lightning Rod in Minecraft

The only way to get a lightning rod is by crafting it. It does not generate naturally anywhere in the world. The crafting recipe is very simple. You will need three copper ingots. To get copper ingots, you first need to find and mine copper ore, which is a very common ore found underground. When you mine it, it drops raw copper. You then need to smelt the raw copper in a furnace or blast furnace to get copper ingots. Once you have at least three copper ingots, open a crafting table. Place the three copper ingots in a single vertical column in the crafting grid. This will create one lightning rod.

How to use Lightning Rod in Minecraft

The main use for a lightning rod is to protect your builds. To use it, simply place it on top of or on the side of your building. It will protect a large area around it from lightning strikes. Any lightning that would have struck within a certain radius will instead be redirected to hit the lightning rod. This prevents fires and keeps your villagers and animals safe. When a lightning rod is struck, it will send out a redstone signal with a strength of 15. This can be used to create some interesting redstone contraptions that are only activated during a thunderstorm. A lightning strike on a lightning rod can also be used to turn a villager into a witch, a pig into a zombified piglin, or a creeper into a charged creeper.

How to craft Lightning Rod in Minecraft

Crafting Table

➤

What can Lightning Rod make in Minecraft

No items can be crafted.

My Story

How This All Started

So basically, I was playing Minecraft one night after a long day doing deliveries, and I was trying to remember what drops what and how to craft certain things. Every website I went to was either dead slow, missing loads of stuff, or just looked terrible. I thought "bloody hell, surely I can do better than this?"

By the way, this My Story section is something new I've only just started adding things here! Most of the site was actually built before I ever wrote this part. Now that the website is live, I'm running into problems galore! So if things look a bit rough or unfinished, bear with me I'm updating and adding as I go.

That was probably a mistake.

A half finished story, oh well. I'll keep adding more as I go!

Learning the Hard Way

I knew absolutely nothing about making websites. Like, properly nothing. I didn't even know what PHP was. But I'm stubborn as anything, so I just started watching YouTube tutorials and reading random stuff online while I was on my breaks.

Turns out building a database is harder than it looks. Who knew? I've probably broken this thing more times than I've fixed it. My laptop has definitely been sworn at more than it deserves.

The worst part is when you spend hours trying to figure out why something doesn't work, and it turns out you missed a semicolon. Or when everything works fine on your computer but looks like complete rubbish on someone else's. Fun times.

The Reality of It

Look, I'm not gonna lie this has been a right pain sometimes. I work full time doing deliveries, so most of this gets done late at night when I should probably be sleeping. I've had way too many energy drinks and definitely not enough sleep.

The database has corrupted itself more times than I care to remember. I've had images that wouldn't load for no reason. CSS that worked yesterday but decided to have a tantrum today. The usual web development nightmare stuff.

But every time I get something working properly, it feels brilliant. Like when I finally got all the block images showing up correctly, or when the search actually started finding things. Small wins, but they keep me going.

What I Actually Want to Build

Here's the thing I want this to be your go to place for everything Minecraft. Not just blocks and items, but proper guides, build tutorials, maybe even schematics you can download. Server info, community stuff, the lot.

I know it doesn't look like much right now, and there's loads missing. But I'm working on it. It takes time when you're learning as you go and doing it around a full time job. But I'd rather take my time and do it properly than rush it and end up with something rubbish.

The plan is to make it the kind of site I actually want to use fast, easy to navigate, with everything you need in one place. No endless ads, no broken links, just useful stuff presented in a way that doesn't make you want to throw your computer out the window.

Why I Keep Going

Honestly? Because every time someone uses this site or gives me feedback, it reminds me why I started. I love Minecraft, I love building things (both in game and apparently websites), and I love the community.

Plus, I've learned loads doing this. Sure, I've wanted to give up more times than I can count, but seeing it slowly come together is pretty satisfying. And if it helps other people find what they're looking for without having to trawl through ten different outdated websites, then that's worth it.

So yeah, bear with me while I figure this all out. It's going to take a while, but it'll get there eventually. Thanks for checking it out, and if you spot anything broken or have suggestions, let me know. I'm still learning, but I'm determined to make this work.