How to Create & Use a Clock in Minecraft

Given that being able to craft your own world-within-a-world, albeit a blocky one, is one of the main draws of Minecraft, it stands to reason that you may want to create a clock. After all, it’s the sort of decorative feature that’s in most homes, even if it doesn’t serve much of a practical function in the game.

Nevertheless, it’s a fun cosmetic feature that can show you where your game is in its day and night cycle while you’re indoors. Plus, a clock is easy to craft and use, as you’ll discover in this guide.

Making a Clock in Minecraft

The only real challenge to making a clock in Minecraft lies in gathering the appropriate materials. You’ll need the following:

• One Redstone Dust
  
• Four Gold Ingots
  
• A crafting table
  

The easiest way to get Redstone Dust is to seek out and mine Redstone ore, which you’ll usually find in the underground sections of the game. Gold Ingots are a little harder to come by because you need to smelt them using gold ore or nether gold ore. The ore tends to generate below Y Level 31 (where you’ll also often find Redstone ore), and you’ll need a pickaxe to mine it.

If you happen to have nine Gold Nuggets available, you can also smelt those into a Gold Ingot. Plus, the Zombified Piglin enemy has a 2.5% chance of dropping a Gold Ingot, with the Drowned enemies offering a 5% drop rate in Minecraft Java Edition and an 11% drop rate in the Bedrock Edition.

Once you have your materials, open your crafting table menu and follow these steps:

1. Place your Redstone Dust in the center of the nine-block crafting grid.
   
2. Drag a Gold Ingot into the middle-top, middle-bottom, middle-left, and middle-right blocks of the grid. The result should look like a “+” sign, with the Redstone Dust in the middle.
   

Placing a Clock in Minecraft

Once you have your clock, you can carry it around and see how it changes between four different forms to display the time of day in Minecraft. It almost looks like a shield when you’re carrying it, though it doesn’t function as one.

But let’s face it – carrying a clock around is inconvenient. Plus, the item is intended as a decorative feature, meaning you’ll want to mount it on a wall. To do that, you’ll need to create an item frame, which you place on your wall to contain your clock.

Create an Item Frame

Item frames are fairly easy to craft, though you need the following materials:

• Eight Sticks
  
• One Leather
  
• A crafting table
  

You can get sticks by placing a Wooden Plank on a crafting table, essentially disassembling it into a set of sticks. Alternatively, you can use your character’s two-by-two inventory crafting grid by placing a pair of Wooden Planks into a column. A Wooden Plank breaks down into two sticks. You can also break down a Log into several Wooden Planks, which you can then turn into sticks.

Getting Leather is a touch trickier because it requires you to put your hunting hat on. The following animals dropped Leather after you’ve killed them:

• Llamas
  
• Foxes
  
• Cows
  
• Mooshrooms
  
• Donkeys
  
• Horses
  
• Mules
  
• Hoglins
  

Spend a little time hunting, and you should get your Leather. Alternatively, you can craft a piece of Leather if you have four Rabbit Hides. Arrange the Rabbit Hides in a square in your personal inventory or via a crafting table to get a piece of Leather.

Once you have your materials, do the following to craft an Item Frame:

1. Open your crafting table and drag the Leather into the middle of the nine-by-nine grid.
   
2. Move a stick into every available grid block, surrounding your leather with sticks.
   

Hang Your Item Frame and Clock

With the Item Frame and Clock in your inventory, all that’s left is to hang them both in an appropriate place. Pick out the perfect spot (perhaps a place where it’s difficult to see Minecraft’s day and night cycle without a clock) and follow these steps:

1. Select the Item Frame from your inventory and use one of the following commands to place it on the wall:
   • Java Edition – Right-click on your mouse
   • Xbox 360 and Xbox One – The LT button
   • Nintendo Switch – The ZL button
   • Pocket Edition – Tap the block where you want to place the Item Frame
   • Windows 10 Edition – Right-click on your mouse
   • Wii U – The ZL button
   • PS3 and PS4 – The L2 button
   • Education Edition – Right-click on your mouse
2. Open your inventory and choose your Clock.
   
3. Place the Clock inside the Item Frame using the same command you used to place the frame.
   

You now have a beautifully framed clock that can take pride of place on your wall.

Reading Your Minecraft Clock

Once you’ve placed your Clock, you’ll notice it doesn’t look like a traditional clock. There are no numbers or hands and certainly no digital display, as the clock works more like a sundial.

Thankfully, it’s simple enough to read.

Daytime

When it’s daytime in Minecraft, the Clock will show a blue background with a yellow sun that gradually moves in a clockwise direction from left to right. It’s midday when the sun is at the top of the clock, allowing you to discern the other times from the sun’s position to the left or right of that midpoint.

Nighttime

When day turns to night in Minecraft, your Clock represents this change by turning the blue background black. The yellow sun is also replaced with a moon, though the Clock is functionally the same. When the moon reaches the top of your Clock, it’s midnight. Again, you can extrapolate the time from there. The moon on the left side of the clock shows that it’s the evening and early night, and the moon on the right shows the early hours of the morning.

Other Dimensions

Minecraft’s day and night cycle isn’t present in the Nether and End dimensions, so your Clock is useless in these areas. If you have it equipped, you’ll see the Clock spinning rapidly, similar to how a compass needle spins when exposed to magnets.

Why Create a Minecraft Clock?

There are several reasons to create a Clock in Minecraft, with the item actually serving some practical use in limited scenarios:

• Decoration – A Clock can be a nice decorative piece in a home or similar structure, especially given that it’s framed so it almost looks like a piece of wall art.
• Tracking Time Underground – You may bring a Clock along with you when you plan to spend a few days underground. It’s especially useful for making sure you don’t emerge in the dead of night, which would place you at risk of being attacked by Phantoms and other creatures.
• Automating Redstone Contraptions – Some inventive players use the Clock item to automate the Redstone contraptions they build. For example, you can use a Clock to automatically time an irrigation system, allowing it to activate and deactivate based on Minecraft’s day and night cycle.

Create Your Clock

A few minutes at a crafting table (and perhaps a few more minutes spent gathering materials) is all you need to create a Clock in Minecraft. Once you have it, you can keep the Clock in your inventory or hang it on a wall using an Item Frame.

Now that you know how to build and use a Clock, we want to hear from you. What ideas do you have for using your Clock in Minecraft? Where do you intend to hang yours once it’s ready? Tell us about your Clock-based shenanigans in the comments section below.