Tutorials/Acquiring a conduit

This tutorial is meant to show you, the player, how to acquire a conduit. There are numerous ways to do it, which will be featured here.

Overview
To craft a conduit, you need to acquire a heart of the sea and 8 nautilus shells. To make it functional, you need up to 42 prismarine or sea lantern blocks. Each ingredient has its own section.

Heart Of The Sea
Heart of the Sea items cannot be farmed and they only generate in buried treasure chests. Most buried treasure is difficult to find.

Step 1: Treasure Maps
Buried treasure maps can be found in shipwrecks and ocean ruin chests. These structures can be found just about everywhere and they are usually marked with bubble columns and drowned. Before diving down, it is a good idea to secure a way to breathe underwater. This can be done with doors, turtle shell helmets, water breathing potions, and bubble columns.

Optionally, the player can feed a nearby dolphin and have them lead the player to a structure with treasure.

Step 2: Following the Map
Buried treasure maps are usually blank with a white indicator dot. This shows where the player is in relation to the buried treasure. Remember that upwards on the map is north and rightwards on the map is east. As the player gets closer to the treasure, the indicator dot will increase in size until they start filling in map features. This may involve a long boat ride. When you reach the “X,” get a shovel ready and start digging around that area. When you find the chest, open it and find the treasure!

Nautilus Shells
Depending on your setup, getting 8 nautilus shells could be tedious.

Method 1: Fishing
This is only practical if you build an AFK fish farm. Fishing this way will also yield fishing rods (some enchanted). Some fish farms are very cheep and easy, so the biggest hurdle is AFK time.

Method 2: Drowned
Drowned have a chance to drop nautilus shells, but ease depends on the Edition.

Bedrock Edition
Drowned have an 8% chance to spawn holding a nautilus shell. Since it carries the nautilus shell in the offhand, it is a guaranteed drop. Also, converting zombies imto drowned resets the drop counters, causing newly-converted drowned to possibly spawn carrying a nautilus shell. This makes nautilus shells arguably the easiest to obtain of the three ingredients in Bedrock Edition.

Java Edition
Drowned have a 3% chance to spawn carrying a nautilus shell. After that, it has an 8.5% chance of dropping it, which can be increased to up to an 11.5% chance with the Looting enchantment. This ends up as a 0.255%-0.345% chance of getting a nautilus shell from any particular drowned. Unfortunately, nautilus shells can only be found with naturally-spawned drowned. A complex drowned farm or a lot of patience is needed in order to get enough nautilus shells in Java Edition.

Prismarine
This is arguably the most difficult ingredient to obtain if the player does not already have a guardian farm. The only source of prismarine or its crafting materials come from ocean monuments. This section is listed last because it is much easier to do when the player has a conduit.

Step 1: Craft a conduit
Ironically, it is easier to get the materials to fully power a conduit if a conduit is used.

Step 2: Get Temporary Underwater Breathing
In order to acquire enough prismarine, the player must secure a way to breathe underwater. The best way is to get into an ocean monument and place a conduit strategically to give the player conduit power. Finding such a room will likely take time, so it would be best if the player secures a temporary way to breathe underwater. This can be done with bubble columns, non-waterloggable non-solid blocks such as doors, Respiration and Aqua Affinity enchantments, and turtle shell helmets. The room to find must have at least 16 prismarine or sea lanterns in any shape around the outline of a 5x5x5 cube centered on the conduit. Once it activates, it will grant the Conduit Power effect, which allows the player to breathe indefinitely, see better, and mine faster underwater.

Step 3: Obtain Prismarine
Prismarine can be obtained from the guardians themselves and from the structure of the monument. The guardians can be a nuisance and the mining fatigue from elder guardians can make mining impossible. For these purposes, it is best to bring building materials that can be broken instantly such as slime blocks and scaffolding. Killing guardians is much easier if the player has a trident enchanted with Impaling and Loyalty. A Riptide-enchanted trident or Depth Strider-enchanted boots are also a good idea.

The only way to break the monument structure with elder guardians in the way is to detonate TNT. To do this effectively, place a gravity block such as sand on top of the TNT. When it ignites, it turns into an entity, causing the gravity block to fall inside it. When the TNT explodes, it will destroy some of the prismarine and leave some items. Even without the extra gravity block, TNT is a good way to quickly kill massive swarms of guardians.