How to make a recovery compass in Minecraft so you won't lose items when you die (2024)

• In Minecraft, the recovery compass item helps you find the last spot you died at.
• The recovery compass is an incredibly useful tool for finding the items you drop after dying.
• To craft a recovery compass, combine a compass with nine echo shards.

Even if you're not playing on Hardcore mode, dying in Minecraft can be a big setback. Aside from getting teleported to the last place you slept, dying also makes you drop all the items in your inventory, including your armor.

Usually this means saying goodbye to all your items. But if you have a recovery compass, a new item introduced in the Wild Update, you can easily find exactly where you died — and everything you dropped.

Minecraft's recovery compass tracks where you've died

Unlike a normal compass that always points north, the recovery compass always points to the last spot your character died in. This means that you can use the recovery compass to track down where you died and recover any items you dropped.

The recovery compass will work no matter how far away you currently are from the spot you died in. But you do need to be in the same dimension (the Overworld, the Nether, or the End), otherwise the needle will just spin randomly.

If you travel far away from your spawn point a lot, the recovery compass is a useful tool. But unfortunately, it's also harder to craft than the normal compass.

How to make a recovery compass in Minecraft

To make a recovery compass, you'll need one normal compass and eight echo shards.

To make a normal compass, combine one unit of redstone dust with four iron ingots. You can mine redstone and iron ore underground, but you'll need to smelt the iron ore to turn it into ingots.

Echo shards are a new item, also introduced in the Wild Update. You can find them in Ancient Cities, massive structures located deep underground at Y coordinate -51. They'll be hidden away in treasure chests, but there's only a ~30% chance that they'll spawn in any given chest.

Once you've got a compass and eight echo shards, go to a crafting table. Place the compass in the crafting table's middle slot and surround it with echo shards.

You've now got a recovery compass, ready to find your last death spot. Put the compass in your character's hotbar, take it out, and follow the needle.