Speed

Overview

Sprinting is already the quickest way to cross ground on foot, and Speed makes it noticeably quicker again — which sounds modest until you measure it over a thousand blocks of Overworld. The practical shape of the effect is that it changes what a journey costs rather than what a fight costs: a Potion of Swiftness turns a three-minute walk out to your mine into two, and a beacon left on Speed makes an entire build site feel different to move around in. It does nothing for a boat, a minecart, a horse or elytra flight, so carry it only when you are genuinely on your own feet. In combat it cuts both ways. The extra pace lets you close on a skeleton before it looses a second arrow and back out of a creeper's blast radius, but it also makes it very easy to overshoot a ledge or run into the ravine you meant to stop at, and the widened field of view takes a moment to read correctly. Sprint-jumping under Swiftness is the fastest legitimate ground movement in the game without a mount, which is exactly why the potion earns a slot in an exploration kit and almost never in a fighting kit.

Covering ground on foot: long overland trips, ferrying materials between a base and a build site, chasing down a fleeing mob, and keeping distance from melee attackers while you line up a bow shot.

Increases walking, sprinting and swimming speed by 20% per level, and widens your field of view slightly.

As a status effect, Speed counts as beneficial. From a base potion you get 180 seconds of it.

The icon sits in the top-right of the inventory with its remaining time beneath it, and coloured particles follow you around, drawn faintly when a beacon or a conduit is the source. A beacon can hold it over an area, which is the only way to run it indefinitely.

How to get it

Brew sugar into an Awkward Potion for a 3:00 Potion of Swiftness; redstone stretches it to 8:00 and glowstone dust makes it Speed II for 1:30. A full 4-tier beacon projects Speed I up to 50 blocks away. The brewing planner has the chain.

Tips

• Sugar is the cheapest brewing ingredient in the game — one sugar cane makes one sugar, so a small farm supplies Swiftness indefinitely.
• Do not drink it before a cave descent; overshooting a drop under Speed causes more deaths than the mobs down there do.
• A beacon on Speed pairs well with a large terraforming project, but Haste is usually the better beacon choice while you are actually mining.
• Fermenting a Potion of Swiftness with a fermented spider eye converts it into Slowness, which is how tipped arrows of Slowness get made.

What each level does

Levels are shown one-based in the inventory and zero-based in commands, so Speed II is written amplifier 1. Per level:

Survival stops at II; commands do not, and will accept an amplifier up to 255.

Properties

The base potion runs 180 seconds. Redstone stretches that to 480, while glowstone spends the duration on a second level and leaves 90. Thrown as a splash, either keeps three quarters of its time on you. A bucket of milk removes it, at the cost of every other effect you have running.

Potion durations

Brewing is where most players meet Speed. The base potion runs 180 seconds; adding redstone dust extends it to 480, and glowstone dust raises the level instead, which costs duration and leaves 90 seconds. You cannot have both on one potion.

Where it comes from

Speed comes from Potion of Swiftness and Beacon.

• Potion of Swiftness
• Beacon

Command

With cheats enabled it hands you Speed I for thirty seconds; raise the last number to raise the level, since 1 is II.

Guides and tools that cover this

• GuidesHow to Brew Every Potion in Minecraft→
• ToolsPotion Brewing Planner→

Frequently asked questions

Related pages

SlownessStrengthHasteResistanceFire ResistanceInvisibilityJump BoostNight Vision