Dried kelp in Minecraft: Everything you need to know

Dried kelp is a Minecraft item that spawns when kelp is farmed and smelted in a furnace or smoker. It has two primary uses that Minecraft players may not know about. It can be a food source as well as a fuel source. Players have even used it in XP farms by using dried kelp to dry kelp and cycle through that.

Whatever the use may be, players should know all about dried kelp. Here's the complete guide.

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The complete guide to dried kelp in Minecraft

For starters, kelp cannot be crafted, so players will need to find it naturally. It can naturally generate in any ocean biome (except for frozen, deep frozen, warm, and deep warm oceans), when it is around seagrass.

Every ocean chunk has a 5.5% chance to generate a group of kelp. It can be a maximum of 26 blocks high, and breaking one piece of it will break all the above pieces and float to the surface.

Kelp spawns naturally in most ocean biomes and can reach up to 26 blocks (Image via Minecraft)

Once it is acquired, nothing can really be done with it (except for placing it in a composter, which has a 30% chance to raise the level), so it needs to be dried. It can be cooked in a furnace, smoker or on a campfire. Each piece of newly dried kelp taken from a furnace gives 0.1 XP.

After that, it can be used as a food source. There is a Bedrock achievement to eat nothing but dried kelp for three days. It's a weak food source, so players will need a lot of it to get by.

To eat dried kelp, press and hold use while it is selected in the hotbar. Eating one piece of dried kelp restores 1 Minecraft hunger and 0.6‌ (Java Edition) or 0.2‌ (Bedrock Edition) hunger saturation, so it doesn't last long.

It can be crafted into dried kelp blocks, which are a good fuel source. Nine dried kelps form one block. The dried kelp block will burn for 4,000 ticks, which is the third-best fuel source behind blocks of coal and buckets of lava.