Brewing

Brewing is the process of creating Potions and Splash Potions by adding various ingredients to water bottles in a Brewing Stand.

General Guide to Brewing
Every Potion starts with a water bottle. Made by filling a Glass Bottle at a water source, or using a Cauldron.

As seen in the brewing chart on the right, the first step of most potions is to create an Awkward Potion, by placing Nether Wart above water bottles in the brewing "grid". Different potions are then created by adding different ingredients to the Awkward Potion. Next, tertiary ingredients can be added to alter the potion in some way. As a general rule, adding Redstone will increase the duration of the potion, adding Glowstone (Dust) will increase its potency, and adding a Fermented Spider Eye will corrupt the potion's effect. Finally, Splash Potions can be created by adding Gunpowder to any potion. This allows the potion to be thrown as a weapon.

While adding an ingredient into glass bottles filled with water or potion, only one of an ingredient is required to fill all three slots. E.g. One Nether Wart will create three Awkward Potions.

Base Ingredients
Base ingredients are the starting point of all potions. Nether Wart is the primary ingredient added to water bottles at this stage, as it is required to make most of the potions. All other base ingredients will only allow the creation of variations of "Potion of Weakness".

Secondary Ingredients
Secondary ingredients imbue an Awkward Potion with a particular effect but do not alter potion duration or intensity. When added directly to a Water Bottle, any of these ingredients will produce a Mundane Potion.

Tertiary Ingredients
Tertiary ingredients increase duration, increase potency, or corrupt the effect of potions. The "longer duration" and "more potent" versions of a potion can be forever interchanged.

Primary
All primary potions are created by brewing a single ingredient with a Water Bottle. Mundane Potion and Potion of Weakness can be combined with Gunpowder to create their throwable Splash Potion counterparts.

Secondary
Secondary potions are created by brewing an ingredient with a primary potion and can be combined with Gunpowder to create their throwable Splash Potion counterparts.

Tertiary
Tertiary potions are created by brewing an ingredient with a secondary potion or another tertiary potion and can be combined with Gunpowder to create their throwable Splash Potion counterparts.

History
Initially, the Cauldron was where potions were brewed. Code in Beta 1.9 pre2 revealed that Potions were brewed by adding water to the Cauldron followed by certain ingredients. Correctly combined ingredients would confer purely beneficial potion effects, and incorrect combinations added negative effects. The system was complicated, lacked a GUI, and formed many duplicate potions (i.e. two potions that were exactly the same could be made in several different ways), so Notch and Jeb came up with a new brewing method using a Brewing Stand. The Cauldron's role in brewing was relegated to being a slightly more efficient storage vessel for water. Brewing was greatly streamlined and simplified when a brewing GUI was added and most duplicate potions were removed (the total possible potions went down from 150 combinations to only 25 different potions in 31 combinations). However, this new system made some potion effects available in earlier 1.9 pre-releases inaccessible (e.g. Nausea, Blindness and Invisibility).

Throwable Splash Potions were introduced in Beta 1.9 Pre4 and brewed by placing gunpowder and any potion together in a brewing stand. This pre-release also introduced Glistering Melon as an ingredients to replace the instant health effect conferred by the Ghast Tear, which then added the effect of regeneration instead. This version also converted certain ingredients into base-secondary ingredients (the Spider Eye, Glistering Melon and Blaze Powder made Mundane Potion when brewed into a water bottle in addition to their previous functions), bringing the potion total to 28 different potions in 35 combinations.

Potion type history
Based on information found in minecraft.jar/lang/en_US.lang, the current potion types from Minecraft 1.0.0 are listed below:


 * Potion of Swiftness
 * Potion of Slowness
 * Potion of Strength
 * Potion of Weakness
 * Potion of Healing
 * Potion of Harming
 * Potion of Regeneration
 * Potion of Fire Resistance
 * Potion of Poison

Due to changes in the brewing system, the following potions are currently not  accessible:


 * Potion of Haste
 * Potion of Dullness
 * Potion of Leaping
 * Potion of Nausea
 * Potion of Resistance
 * Potion of Water Breathing
 * Potion of Invisibility
 * Potion of Blindness
 * Potion of Night Vision
 * Potion of Hunger

Trivia

 * As long as at least one of the three bottom spaces is filled, the brewing will continue, and additional bottles of water or potion can be added. However, if the ingredient is removed, or the bottom 3 slots are emptied at any time during the process, the process will stop and nothing will have been brewed.
 * The three potions do not necessarily have to be the same.
 * Upgrading effect of potion that has no time parameter (i.e. Instant Health, Harming) with glowstone dust has no downsides.
 * Upgrading a Fire Resistance Potion with redstone dust has no downsides.
 * Although Jeb said that in the 1.9 pre-release 3 there were 161 possible different potion combinations with 2,653 in the future, in the actual third pre-release only 22 different potions could be made without the use of external programs. Of those, 19 potions had one of 8 different effects.
 * The Mundane Potion made from redstone has a different metadata (64) than the mundane potion made from any other ingredient (8192). Unlike Mundane 64, Mundane 8192 can be made into a Splash Mundane Potion by adding gunpowder that is, like its base potion, without any effect.
 * There are many Potions that were left behind from 1.9 pre-releases that fill up different metadatas that otherwise cannot be brewed or obtained without a SMP server command or inventory editor. These potions include but are not limited to: Bungling Potion, Buttering Potion, Debonair Potion, Refined Potion.
 * Splash potions can be fired by Dispensers.
 * Cauldrons can be entirely circumvented from the brewing process with no ill effects, as bottles can be filled by right-clicking on a water source block. This is an improvement from cauldrons, as one does not have to replenish the source block every three bottles, or indeed at all. This, however can not be done in the Nether, where cauldrons become essential.
 * Some splash potions have the opposite effect on undead mobs such as zombies and skeletons.