How to Make Cracked Nether Bricks in Minecraft

Cracked Nether Bricks are a decorative block made by smelting one Nether Bricks block in a furnace, and every smelt also pays 0.1 experience. A furnace is the only production route: no crafting-table recipe turns Nether Bricks into the cracked form. Any pickaxe harvests Cracked Nether Bricks — a wooden pickaxe is the minimum tier — and mining without a pickaxe drops nothing. Cracked Nether Bricks stack to 64, emit no light, and never catch fire, even from lava. Minecraft added Cracked Nether Bricks in Java Edition 1.16 and in Bedrock Edition 1.16.0.

The cracked texture serves ruined builds: a web of fractures runs across the fortress-brick face and fakes an age that plain Nether Bricks cannot show. Builders mix cracked and plain bricks on fortress walls, bridges, and barracks to break up large flat surfaces. Nether Bricks are easy to stock: the plain blocks generate in the walls and pillars of every Nether fortress, and four Nether Brick items in a 2×2 grid craft one plain block. For the look of an ancient fortress, run a batch of Nether Bricks through a furnace before the next Nether build.