How to Make Tinted Glass in Minecraft (2023)

Glass blocks have been a part of the colorful, blocky world of Minecraft for a long time. In the 1.17 patch for the game, the developers added an interesting new kind of glass to the game — tinted glass blocks. In this guide on how to make tinted glass in Minecraft, we’ll help you craft some of this glass, covering the materials needed to mass-produce it and some fun ways to apply it to your builds.

Let’s get started!

Tinted Glass Formula

The tinted glass recipe in Minecraft is fairly simple. You can craft it with four pieces of amethyst and one piece of glass. Note that you can’t turn them into panes just yet. Unlike other styles of colored glass, you can only place tinted glass as solid blocks for now. Also unlike other glass, you can pick it up by breaking it with tools or by hand, so you don’t need to be as cautious about placing it as you would with regular glass.

Tinted glass is easily confused with stained glass. The difference is that stained glass is just colorful regular glass — they function the same in every other way. Tinted glass, on the other hand, doesn’t allow any light to pass through it at all. You can use tinted glass to make one-way windows, completely blocking light from entering or exiting an area while still being able to see through it.

Getting Glass

The first step to get tinted glass in Minecraft is just getting ahold of some glass. Just like in real life, glass is made from sand. It doesn’t matter which kind of sand you use, whether it’s from deserts, beaches, or the badlands. You’ll most effectively harvest sand with a shovel, but TNT can also make quick work of a desert for you.

Going into the desert at night is dangerous because of how wide-open the area is. You can use this in your favor, though. Baiting creepers into exploding on sand is a great way to harvest a lot of it at once. Each piece of sand can be smelted in a regular furnace to create a glass block, and it’ll smelt relatively quickly.

This is a great opportunity for an automated furnace, as pictured above. You can make these with hoppers, chests, and a furnace. The hoppers need to be aligned as pictured or the furnace won’t be able to operate automatically. You can use this automatic furnace for all sorts of activities.

Finding Amethyst

Seeking amethyst means looking for rounded, bulbous chunks of calcite and smooth basalt. Inside these building-sized geodes, you’ll find a shining room full of amethyst blocks. These blocks cannot be moved through any means, even if mined with a silk-touch pickaxe. They make a unique, sparkling noise when walking across or interacting with them in general. The most important part of the amethyst geode is that it buds off into amethyst clusters when exposed to air. It goes through four phases before reaching its maximum, harvestable size.

You’ll need to return to the amethyst geode frequently in order to harvest enough amethyst for your needs. Unlike most other farmable items, you can’t move the cluster at all to grow more amethyst at home, so you’ll need to mark your path properly to find the geode. You can often find them by staring deep into the water around ocean biomes, especially if aided by a night vision potion, but you might also stumble across one while you’re underground.

Fun Tinted Glass Builds in Minecraft

So what exactly does tinted glass do in Minecraft? Not much, but that’s what makes it interesting. Tinted glass doesn’t allow any light to pass through it, and mobs can’t see you through it either. You can use it to build small rooms inside your base where monsters are allowed to spawn and use tinted glass to make a one-way viewing chamber of a dark room. A concrete and tinted glass skyscraper can make a very cool, modern effect.

The best Survival mode use for tinted glass is to use it in a small mushroom harvesting room that can be observed from outside and is kept tight enough that it’s unlikely to spawn any monsters inside it. You’ll notice it appears monsters can see you through the glass, but they cannot. Even staring at an Enderman through glass will not force them into a rage like usual.

Join the High Ground!

Tinted glass is a great addition to the game, but getting enough sand and amethyst together can be tough. We hope this guide to how to make tinted glass in Minecraft helps you with gathering enough materials and applying the glass correctly. Let us know your thoughts in the comments, and be sure to subscribe to our newsletter for more content like this!

Happy gaming!