How to Craft a Notch Apple (and Why You Can’t Anymore)

#What a notch apple actually is

A notch apple is the enchanted golden apple in Minecraft, the glowing version of the golden apple that gives far stronger buffs. The nickname comes from Markus “Notch” Persson, who created the game. You will also see it called a “god apple” or “god-pple,” because for a long time it was the strongest single-use survival item in the game.

There are two golden apples, and mixing them up is where most confusion starts. The regular golden apple is still craftable: one apple in the center of the grid, eight gold ingots around it. It gives you Absorption and a short Regeneration. The enchanted golden apple, the notch apple, has the enchantment shimmer on its icon and stacks Fire Resistance and Resistance on top of stronger Absorption and Regeneration, so you can eat one and tank things that would otherwise kill you. That extra survivability is exactly why its recipe got taken away.

Exact effect durations shift between Minecraft versions. Check the in-game tooltip for your build.

#The old recipe, and when it went away

Before Java Edition 1.9, the notch apple had a brutally expensive recipe. You placed a single apple in the middle of the crafting grid and surrounded it with eight blocks of gold. Not ingots, blocks. Since one gold block is nine ingots, a single notch apple cost you 72 gold ingots, which is nearly a full stack of ingots for one apple. It was expensive on paper, but gold farms and long play sessions meant a well-set-up player could still stockpile them, and in PvP that made whoever had the most gold close to unkillable.

Mojang shipped 1.9, the Combat Update, on February 29, 2016, and the recipe was gone. The item stayed in the game with all its power intact; only the ability to make it disappeared. Bedrock and the old Pocket Edition dropped their versions of the recipe in the same combat-parity window. From that point on, the notch apple became something you find, not something you build. If you loaded up an old world or an old version and were surprised the grid no longer accepted the pattern, that is the change you hit.

#How to get a notch apple now

Since you cannot craft it, the only survival-legit way to get one is to find it in a generated loot chest. I keep a running mental map of where they turn up, and the odds are wildly uneven across structures. Your best bet, by a large margin, is the Nether.

• Bastion remnants are the answer. If you want notch apples, go raid bastions. They show up in the generic chests often enough that clearing a few bastions usually leaves you with a handful.
• Ruined portals can carry one in their chest, alongside gold gear and obsidian.
• Desert temples, dungeons (the mossy-cobble spawner rooms), mineshaft minecart chests, strongholds and woodland mansions each have a small chance. These are the rare-drop sources; do not go out of your way for them expecting a notch apple.

The practical routine: build a Nether-portal loop, find bastions, and loot every chest. On my survival world that has been far more reliable than tearing through overworld structures hoping for a lucky roll. Loot tables do change between versions, so if you are on an older or a snapshot build, the exact chances will differ from whatever a wiki page says today.

#How to make it craftable again

This is what most people actually want when they search for the recipe: a way to bring it back. You have two clean options, and neither needs a mod loader.

Option 1: spawn one with a command

Fastest path. Turn on cheats (or open to LAN with cheats allowed), then run the give command. This works in both Java and Bedrock:

# drops one notch apple into your inventory
/give @p enchanted_golden_apple 1

# need a stack for testing?
/give @p enchanted_golden_apple 64

I use this constantly when I am checking the item’s effects in a creative world. It is a spawn, not a craft, so it does not restore the recipe. It just hands you the apple.

Option 2: re-add the recipe with a datapack

If you want the old gold-block crafting back for real, a datapack is the honest way to do it without touching mods. A datapack is just a folder of JSON files that Minecraft reads. Add one shaped-recipe file that describes the pre-1.9 pattern and the recipe returns to your crafting table. The core file looks like this:

// data/<namespace>/recipes/notch_apple.json
{
  "type": "minecraft:crafting_shaped",
  "pattern": [
    "GGG",
    "GAG",
    "GGG"
  ],
  "key": {
    "G": { "item": "minecraft:gold_block" },
    "A": { "item": "minecraft:apple" }
  },
  "result": { "item": "minecraft:enchanted_golden_apple" }
}

Drop that into a datapack folder with a valid pack.mcmeta, put the pack in your world’s datapacks directory, and run /reload. The recipe comes back exactly as it was: eight gold blocks around one apple. Plenty of ready-made “craftable notch apple” datapacks exist if you would rather download than write JSON, but the file above is the entire trick, so writing it yourself takes a minute. This is a per-world change, which I like: your legit survival world stays vanilla while your test world gets the recipe.

#How rare is it, really

Rare enough to feel special, common enough that you should not treat one like a trophy you never eat. The framing that helped me: notch apples are Nether currency. If you are actively looting bastions, they accumulate. If you never go to the Nether, you might play for months and see one or two from overworld chests. That gap is the whole reason people think it is either super rare or no big deal depending on how they play.

So the real cost was never rolled into a recipe after 1.9. It was moved into travel and risk: getting to the Nether, surviving a bastion full of piglins, and getting home with the loot. That is a more interesting price than 72 gold ingots at a crafting table, which is probably why Mojang has left the recipe out for nearly a decade instead of quietly restoring it.

#If you meant the other kind of notch

Worth saying plainly, because search sends both crowds to the same words: if you landed here looking for the notch on a MacBook and not a Minecraft apple, this is the wrong page, but you are close to the right site. NotchBay is a Mac app I build that turns the camera notch at the top of a MacBook display into a live little hub for music, calls, your clipboard and dictation. Different notch entirely, same word.

If that is you, a couple of starting points on this blog: what you can actually change about the notch area in Dynamic Island customization, and, since download safety is a fair first worry, an honest look at one of the free options in is Boring Notch safe. NotchBay itself needs macOS 26 (Tahoe) and a MacBook that has a notch; there is a link at the end of this page if you want it. No hard sell, you came here for an apple.

#Frequently asked questions