Water Breathing

Overview

The air bar is the timer that shapes every underwater build, and Water Breathing simply removes it. That sounds like a convenience and it is really a change of category: with it, an ocean monument, a shipwreck at Y minus 40 or a drowned farm becomes a place you can work in rather than a place you visit between breaths. Pufferfish is the ingredient, which is the joke of the recipe — the fish that poisons you when eaten is the fish that lets you live underwater when brewed. A three-minute base is short for real underwater work, so the extended eight-minute version is the one worth making, and most players brew it in threes and carry the lot. Two alternatives are worth knowing because they cost nothing to maintain. A turtle shell helmet grants ten extra seconds of air, which is enough to make surfacing routine rather than urgent, and an activated conduit supplies Water Breathing continuously inside its radius as part of Conduit Power. For a monument raid the conduit is strictly better: it survives a milk bucket, it covers the whole site, and it also removes the mining penalty that potions do nothing about.

Long underwater jobs — clearing an ocean monument, excavating a shipwreck, building a base below the waterline, or draining a section of ocean without surfacing every fifteen seconds.

Stops your air bar from draining underwater. Combined with a conduit it makes ocean monuments straightforward.

Water Breathing is a beneficial status effect. The plain potion of it runs for 180 seconds.

While it is on you, the top-right of the inventory shows the icon and the time left, and you give off particles in the effect's colour, dimmer when the source is ambient. No beacon carries it, so each dose is finite.

How to get it

Brew 1 pufferfish into an Awkward Potion for a 3:00 Potion of Water Breathing; redstone stretches it to 8:00. An activated conduit grants it permanently, and a Turtle Helmet adds 10 seconds of air on its own.

Tips

• Brew the extended 8:00 version rather than the base one; three minutes rarely covers a single monument room.
• A conduit beats potions for any repeated trip because it also cancels the underwater mining penalty that Aqua Affinity fixes.
• Pufferfish are a fishing junk drop, so a rod with Lure III supplies the ingredient faster than hunting them does.
• Milk removes it — never drink milk underwater to clear Mining Fatigue unless a conduit is already running.

What each level does

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

You cannot reach past I legitimately, though a command will set it as high as 255.

Properties

Straight from the stand it lasts 180 seconds, 480 with redstone dust added, or if you spend the duration on level II with glowstone instead. Splash versions land at three quarters of the time. Milk is the only cure, and it clears every effect you are carrying at once.

Potion durations

Brewing is where most players meet Water Breathing. 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 seconds. You cannot have both on one potion.

Where it comes from

Water Breathing comes from Potion of Water Breathing and Pufferfish brewing.

• Potion of Water Breathing
• Pufferfish brewing

Command

With cheats enabled it hands you Water Breathing 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

Fire ResistanceInvisibilityJump BoostNight VisionRegenerationSlow FallingSpeedStrength