When you’re looking to collect Amethyst shards in Minecraft, you want to seek out the Amethyst geodes buried underground. These locations are surrounded by a layer of smooth basalt, calcite, and right in the middle is an area full of Amethyst blocks and bud Amethyst blocks. On the bud Amethyst blocks, you’re going to growing Amethyst crystals. When they’re fully grown, they become Amethyst clusters that you can harvest to collect several shards to use on a handful of crafting projects.
There are two primary stages the growing Amethyst goes through, and they all happen on top of the budding Amethyst blocks, which are different than a regular Amethyst block. A budding Amethyst block won’t have any distinct cracks in the center, whereas the budding one has a distinct shattered pattern.
An Amethyst bud can only grow from the ones with cracks. When it does, it goes through three stages, starting as a small Amethyst bud, and eventually becoming a medium, and then a large. At the large stage, the next development transition is to become an Amethyst cluster, which contains all of the shards that you can mine. After you mine the cluster and you keep the budding Amethyst block there, you can return to it to mine it again once it goes through the cycle all over again.
An Amethyst bud block has a 20% chance every random game tick to grow another Amethyst bud on one of its sides, so long as it is free. If there are no free slots, and it’s already growing an Amethyst bud, then that bud moves to the next growth stage. A game tick in Minecraft happens every 0.05 seconds, with 20 happening in a single second, so these crystals do not take too long to grow. If you want to grow multiple on a budding Amethyst block, you can free up all of the blocks surrounding it and wait for more to develop.
There’s no direct way to influence these crystals. You’re better off clearing an area surrounding an Amethyst budding block, waiting for more to develop, and then returning after a few in-game Minecraft days.
