How to Make TNT in Minecraft (and a Simple TNT Cannon)

Here’s how to make TNT in Minecraft: put 5 gunpowder and 4 sand in a crafting table. The gunpowder goes in the four corners and the center, the sand in the spots between. Red sand works too. Light the TNT with flint and steel or redstone, and it explodes after 4 seconds. On your own server, one game rule switches TNT off. Checked for Java 26.3 on 27 October 2026.

How to make TNT in Minecraft: the recipe

TNT is a shaped recipe. It fills the whole 3 by 3 grid of a crafting table.

Any mix of sand and red sand works. Put the TNT in the grid together with a minecart and you get a minecart with TNT. That one goes off 4 seconds after it rolls over a powered activator rail. Its blast grows with its speed: power 4 at rest, up to 11.5 when it moves fast.

Where do you get gunpowder and sand?

• Creepers, ghasts and witches drop 0 to 2 gunpowder each. Looting adds up to 1 per level.
• The wandering trader can sell 4 gunpowder or 8 sand for 1 emerald.
• Ready-made TNT: every desert pyramid hides 9 under the floor of its treasure room, as a trap.

How to light TNT

Hitting TNT doesn’t set it off: it just breaks and drops. These things do light it:

• Flint and steel. Craft it from 1 iron ingot and 1 flint. If you sneak while you use it, the block only catches fire and lights a few seconds later.
• A fire charge. Gunpowder, blaze powder and coal or charcoal make 3.
• A redstone signal from a button, lever, pressure plate or redstone torch.
• Something burning, such as an arrow from a bow with Flame, a fireball or fire that spreads to the block.
• Another explosion. That’s why a pile of TNT goes off almost at once.
• A dispenser. Load it with TNT and it places lit TNT in front of it.

Lit TNT turns into an entity called primed TNT. It falls when there’s nothing under it. Water, pistons and other explosions push it around. Lit by fire or redstone, it explodes after 80 game ticks, which is 4 seconds. Lit by another blast, it waits only 0.5 to 1.5 seconds.

Keep your distance. On Normal, one TNT does up to 56 damage, almost three times your 20 health points. On Peaceful it doesn’t hurt players. Every block it destroys drops as an item.

Does TNT work underwater?

In Java, TNT that explodes in water breaks no blocks. One trick gets around that: put sand or gravel on top before you light it. The sand falls into the spot of the lit TNT, and the blast breaks blocks after all. In Bedrock Edition that trick fails. There, only underwater TNT works, and only with the Education Edition option on.

Build a simple TNT cannon in Minecraft

A TNT cannon in Minecraft uses the blast of some TNT (the charge) to throw one lit TNT (the shot). It works because TNT that explodes in water breaks no blocks, but still pushes entities. That includes lit TNT. This design follows an older version of the Minecraft Wiki tutorial. Try it in a test world first.

1. Build a channel 1 block wide and about 6 blocks long, with solid walls on both sides and at the back.
2. Pour water in at the back, so it flows to the front.
3. Close the front with a slab. The shot sits on top of it, out of the water.
4. Fill the channel with TNT, except the water source. That’s the charge. More charge gives a longer shot.
5. Wire a button to redstone dust on top of the walls. The dust powers the wall blocks, and they light the charge. Stop the dust before the slab, or it lights the shot too early.
6. Run a second line from the same button to the shot, through 4 redstone repeaters on their longest delay of 0.4 seconds.
7. Place a TNT on the slab, press the button and step back.

The charge explodes after 4 seconds. The shot was lit 1.6 seconds later, so it’s still burning when the blast throws it. It goes off 1.6 seconds into its flight and breaks blocks where it lands. So aim at open ground.

TNT duping in Java: how a TNT duper works

A TNT duper makes lit TNT without using up any TNT. A piston pushes a TNT block that got a redstone update at exactly the right moment. The TNT lights and becomes primed TNT, but the piston still moves the block. You get free lit TNT, and the block stays.

A well-known small design puts a minecart on a detector rail on slime blocks, with the TNT next to a coral fan. Every time a piston pushes the whole contraption forward, lit TNT appears under the block. Large duping arrays light up to 10 TNT per push with a coral fan, or 11 with an observer.

According to the Minecraft Wiki, this works in vanilla Java since 1.14. Mojang patched TNT duping several times, but now leaves it in on purpose. Technical players need it for things the normal game can’t do, like ender pearl cannons and long-range TNT cannons.

TNT dupers on a Paper server

Paper blocks TNT duping out of the box. In its default config/paper-global.yml, unsupported-settings.allow-piston-duplication is false. According to the Paper documentation, that setting covers TNT, carpets and rails, but not sand. Our Minecraft servers run Paper with Java 25 by default. So a TNT duper won’t dupe anything until you change that setting.

Want dupers on your SMP? Set the option to true in File managers, save the file and restart your server. Paper lists it under unsupported settings: you use it at your own risk, and it may disappear in a later version.

Turn off TNT on your server

Want to turn off TNT on a server completely? Use the game rule tnt_explodes. It’s been in Java since 1.21.5 and is true by default. Set it to false and TNT can’t be lit and won’t explode. Minecarts with TNT don’t go off either.

1. Open your server console in the game panel, as in Use your server console.
2. Type gamerule tnt_explodes false without a slash and press Enter. In the game, an operator types it with a slash.
3. Type gamerule tnt_explodes to see the current value.
4. On Paper, every world has its own game rules. So repeat it for the Nether with execute in minecraft:the_nether run gamerule tnt_explodes false, and the same with minecraft:the_end.

• Isn’t mob_griefing enough? No. With mob_griefing false, creepers, ghast fireballs and withers stop breaking blocks, and endermen stop picking them up. TNT ignores that rule.
• Older server? From 1.21.5 to 1.21.10 the rule is called tntExplodes. Older Java versions don’t have it. In Bedrock Edition it’s tntexplodes, or TNT Explodes under Advanced in the world settings.
• Only near spawn? The WorldGuard plugin protects a region. For a region called spawn, /rg flag spawn tnt deny blocks TNT there. WorldGuard needs WorldEdit to select the area.
• Lag from big blasts? In spigot.yml, max-tnt-per-tick sets how many TNT the server handles per tick. The default is 100.

More ways to stop damage are in How to protect your Minecraft server from griefers. Other handy commands are in Useful Minecraft commands. Stuck? Open a ticket in your CakeHosting account.