The game of Minecraft has many tasks for the player to perform. These range from the simplest, such as a building a house with a door and glass windows to keep yourself safe from monsters, to adventures that can take months to complete.

This entry describes one of the most elaborate, a machine to allow you to breath underwater. (There are simpler, more limited ways of breathing underwater, such as the Respirate spell, but they generally only last for a short time.)

This is not a small device you can carry around like an aqualung. It is a large machine that takes a large amount of resources to build, and must be fixed in one place. Once switched on, a volume of water around it is safe to swim in without having to breathe. It's permanent, unless you deactivate it by removing parts of the machine. There's also a bonus that it provides light, and attacks any monsters that get to close to it.

The device is called an "activated conduit". The conduit itself is easy enough to build, but it must be activated by putting it in an activating frame that is not so easy to build.

Building the Conduit

The conduit itself is a small device occupying one block. To build it you will need:

• 8 x Nautilus shells - these are often carried by "drowned" zombies. Go into the sea and kill a lot of zombies. You will eventually collect 8 of these Nautilus shells.
• 1 x Heart of the Sea - this blue sphere is found in buried treasure chests.

Find Buried Treasure Method 1: (I haven't tried this)

Craft a fishing rod and go fishing. Catch some fish, and feed them to passing dolphins. Follow the dolphins in a rowing boat and they will lead you to buried treasure.

Find Buried Treasure Method 2:

Find a shipwreck. If you're lucky it will be on a beach. If not, it will be underwater. Using lots of sand, build a wall around the ship. Then remove all the water inside the wall by replacing the top layer of water with dirt, then remove and repeat until all the water is gone. Search the ship. There will almost always be at least one chest on the ship, and sometimes as many as three. One of these will have a treasure map in it. There will be an X marking the spot. It will also have a symbol showing you where you are. The buried treasure is usually somewhere close to where the map is found, so you should already be marked on the map. It is usually buried under sand and sandstone - it's rarely more than a few layers of stone below the sand. Note that treasure is often buried under water, so you may have to build walls of sand and use the dirt place/replace trick to empty the water above it.

Find Buried Treasure Method 3:

Find an Ocean Temple Ruin - these are made from sandstone with polished blocks of other stones. If you're lucky you'll find one on an island. Usually, however, they are in medium deep water. The underwater ones can usually be located by looking at the ocean at night - if you see a faint bright spot, it could be the sea lantern of an ocean temple ruin. These ruins usually have a buried treasure chest in them, either in the centre or below the lights if there are any.

Once you have the ingredients, you can craft the conduit on a crafting table.

Collecting Prismarine for the Activating Frame

The conduit will work as a bright light if you place it on any surface, but it will not allow breathing under water until it is activated. For this you need lots of the rare stone called prismarine. You can use pure prismarine or prismarine bricks.

Sea lanterns, glowing blocks that you may find in ocean ruins, are also made of prismarine and will work for making the frame, but you can't mine them in the normal way. They will shatter, leaving only a few crystals. You must use a pickaxe with the "Silk Touch" enchantment on it to mine them while preserving them as lanterns. Then you can use them in the same way as other prismarine blocks to make the frame.

From here on in these instructions, any reference to "prismarine" means pure prismarine, prismarine bricks or sea lanterns in any combination.

The activation frame is made from 42 blocks, and at least 16 of these must be prismarine. The more blocks of prismarine there are in the frame, the bigger a volume of water is protected by the conduit, so ideally you should aim for all 42 blocks being prismarine.

The problem is that prismarine only occurs naturally in giant constructions at the bottom of the sea called Ocean Monuments. These are rare but vast. There is more prismarine in a monument than you will ever need. But they are are guarded by creatures called Guardians who will attack you if you approach the monument. They can shoot killing beams at you (often described as Laser Beams).

In addition, there are Elder Guardians who have magical powers. If you approach an Ocean Monument, you will see a ghostly image of an elder guardian and hear a bell sound. You have been hit by the "Mining Fatigue" spell - your mining ability has been greatly reduced to less than one 30th its normal strength, so that a block that would normally take a second to mine takes more than half a minute. So you can't adopt the strategy of diving down, avoiding the laser beams and chipping off a block of prismarine from the monument. The Mining Fatigue also reduces your speed of attack.

In fact, the easiest way to find an Ocean Monument is to row around the ocean in a boat until you get hit by the Mining Fatigue spell. You'll now know there is a monument on the ocean bed below you.

There are two main approaches to getting prismarine from an ocean monument:

• Swim down and attack the guardians, until they all have been killed. After they shoot their beam, their weapon needs to recharge so you have time to attack them. Also, if you hide behind something, their weapon deactivates and discharges, so they have to start charging it again when they see you. By dodging behind pillars, you may be able to eventually defeat the guardians. But remember, this must be done at the bottom of the ocean and you can't breathe underwater.
• Locate the monument, then dig a tunnel under it from a distance. Dig upwards into the monument from below. Because you are in a tunnel, you won't have to deal with the normal guardians with their killing beams, but you will still be struck by the "Mining Fatigue" spell, so mining will take a long time. Use a diamond pickaxe to increase your speed. A useful tip is that blocks made of slime are not affected by the Mining Fatigue spell, so you should collect as much slime as possible in advance and craft it into blocks. If you need blocks that you will later remove, such as blocks to stand on while mining upwards, you can use slime blocks - these can then be removed with no effort.

You need between 16 and 42 blocks of prismarine. If you can manage it, it is well worth the extra effort to get the full 42.

Building the Activation Frame and Activating the Conduit

The activation frame is made from 42 blocks. (This is not a Douglas Adams reference, it is just a side-effect of the shape of the device you need to construct.) At least 16 of the blocks must be prismarine for the device to activate. The range of the activated conduit is based on the number of prismarine blocks you have in the frame:

Divide the number of prismarine blocks by 7, discard any fractional part, then multiply by 16.

Thus, for example, a frame with 16 prismarine blocks divided by 7 gives 2.29. Discard the .29 and treat this as 2. Multiply by 16 to give a range of 32 blocks. So anywhere within 32 blocks of the conduit will be breathable water. The range is summarised by this table:

You must build the activation frame in the location you want protected. The activated conduit will protect all the water within its range, so you could build it at the bottom of the sea, or on a platform on or near the surface of the sea. Bear in mind that you will be attacked by "Drowned" zombies while you are building it.

The frame consists of three hollow 5×5 squares of blocks, each one perpendicular to the other two, with the conduit at the centre. The conduit itself must be completely surrounded by water - that is, it must be at the centre of a 3×3×3 cube of water. If you're building the frame above water, you must surround it with a water-retaining box and fill it with water.

Build the frame as follows:

• Place 9 blocks on a flat surface to make a plus (+) sign. Each bar of the plus is 5 blocks long.
• Place a soft, easily removable block such as sand or mud on the centre of the plus sign. Place the conduit on top of this soft block, then remove the block so that the conduit is floating above the centre of the plus.
• Place four blocks on top of each end of the plus sign, making four pillars, each one five blocks high.
• Join the tops of the four pillars to make another plus sign on the top, identical to the one on the bottom. You now have two hollow 5×5 squares, at right angles to each other, intersecting at the top and bottom of the frame.
• Add blocks on the middle level, half-way up the vertical pillars, to make a third hollow square, this one being in a horizontal plane.

The five layers of the activation frame are shown in this table:

You can add other blocks anywhere else you want, but you must not block the space around the central conduit. It must be surrounded by water.

If the frame and conduit are under water, the conduit is now activated. You will see it spinning slowly in the centre of the frame. You will be able to breathe anywhere close to it, and monsters approaching within a few blocks' distance of it will be attacked by coloured threads, eventually killing them.

If the frame is above the water, you must fill it with water. This can be done by filling in the outer parts not occupied by the frame to make a 5×5×5 box, then filling it with water.

Uses for a conduit

• If there is a coral reef, you can put your conduit in the middle of it and enjoy looking at the corals
• You may want to put it near an Ocean Monument so that you can take over the monument and explore its many rooms. This is much easier when you don't have to keep going back up to the surface for air.
• If there is a complicated flooded cave system, you could use a conduit to explore it and it will light the way too.