How to make a recovery compass in Minecraft

The Wild Update for Minecraft has made the already dangerous world you live in even more dangerous. While the swamp may not pose many new threats, the Deep Dark, and the new mobs that lurk in those dangerous depths, can easily send even the most experienced player back to spawn. No matter how well-prepared you are and how great your equipment is, sometimes death is just unavoidable. However, there’s a new item that can make that sting a little less painful.

The recovery compass is a brand new item you can craft for yourself in Minecraft that, while not completely negating the negatives, makes an unfortunate death a little more tolerable. However, this item uses a brand new resource just introduced in The Wild Update that wasn’t previously known about. Then, once you have it, there are a few tricks to understanding how it works. Here’s exactly what the recovery compass does and how you can make one in Minecraft.

What is the recovery compass?

In short, the recovery compass turns a feature that players have already been using via console commands into an in-game item. It is a compass, as the name suggests, but instead of pointing to either your spawn point or loadstone, the recovery compass points in the direction of your last death. There are a few main things to keep in mind when using it, though.

First, you need to be in the same dimension as where you died for it to work. If you died in the Nether, for example, the recovery compass won’t work in the overworld, and vice versa.

Second, it only points in the direction of your most recent death. If you die on your way to recovering your XP and dropped loot, the compass will then point to that new death location.

Finally, the compass can’t show you depth. Hopefully, you will know more or less what elevation you were at when you died, but the compass can only lead you toward it via the X-axis.