Minecraft Banners: Creating, Dyeing, and Using

In Minecraft, you can bring your fantasies to life and create your own personal world. This includes banners, which may seem insignificant at first glance but should be present in every world. Banners are an extremely complex item, perhaps even the item with the most possibilities in Minecraft! Many players don’t engage with their endless combinations, so today we’re giving you the essential information to start using banners yourself.

Finding and Crafting Banners in Minecraft

You can acquire banners in three different ways. Perhaps you’ve already found some in your world and stored them in a chest, only to forget about them later. It’s worth bringing them out and using them for your constructions.

There are various places in the world where you can find banners:

• at the entrance of an End city

• in a woodland mansion

• in villages

• from Illagers

• at outposts

Of course, you can also craft banners yourself. You’ll need six wool of one color and a stick. This will give you one of 16 different base banners on which you can then build your patterns. It’s worthwhile to have a wool farm if you want many banners in different colors (Minecraft Wool Farm Guide: Easily Farm Automatic Wool in All Colors) .

Lastly, you can trade banners with villagers. A cartographer or a shepherd at the expert level will trade you a banner of any color for three emeralds. This can also be a good way to obtain many banners of a specific type.

Dyeing Banners with the Loom

Now that you’ve created one of the 16 colored banners, what’s next? There are endless possibilities for designing the banner according to your wishes! First, you should craft a loom from two wooden planks and two strings to unlock all options. Previously, you had to create patterns in the crafting table, but thanks to the loom, that’s a thing of the past!

The loom offers you a multitude of patterns that you can apply to your banner upon first use. You can apply up to six patterns on a banner to create something unique. There are geometric shapes and other patterns to choose from. Place your banner in the designated slot, add a dye, and select a pattern. It will then be applied, and you can continue.

Discovering Rare Banner Patterns

However, there are also ten additional patterns not directly available in the loom that you need to craft or find. These templates represent various symbols or patterns, giving you even more ways to make your banners unique.

The six craftable banner templates are:

• Flower: Oxeye Daisy and paper

• Creeper: Creeper head and paper

• Skull: Wither skeleton skull and paper

• Mojang: Enchanted golden apple and paper

• Thing: Vine and paper

• Field Masoned: Brick and paper

The four findable banner templates are:

• Globe: Trade with a master cartographer for 8 emeralds

• Snout: Reward in the ominous chest in a trial chamber

• Windswept: Reward in a normal chest in a trial chamber or as loot in a chest (Minecraft Trial Chambers: How to Find & Master Them!)

• Piglin: Loot from a chest in a bastion remnant (The Ultimate Guide to Minecraft Bastion Remnants in the Nether)

Once you’ve crafted or found one of the patterns, you can use it repeatedly. This is especially useful for hard-to-find items like the enchanted golden apple! They are automatically stored in the loom and can be used for all patterns from then on.

Creative Pattern Combinations in Minecraft

With all the patterns available, you have many opportunities to create banners in Minecraft. Remember, you can only combine the base color with six additional patterns. Ample dye should also be on hand; we’ve already made a separate guide for that (Minecraft: Complete Guide to Dyes and Automatic Farms) .

You should experiment and try to create your own patterns. Think of the banner as a sort of canvas. Start with the pattern and color you want in the background and work your way forward. Each pattern is added as another layer. You can always remove layers by clicking the banner on a cauldron with water. If you like a pattern, you can duplicate it with a blank banner of the same base color in the crafting table without using more dyes.

You can find many more patterns to create on the internet. We recommend the website Minecraft Tools, where each step is recorded individually. But you’ll also find plenty of great templates on Reddit, YouTube, or other forums that you can replicate.

Using Banners for Maps and Shields

There are two other cool uses for banners that you should know about. First, you can combine a finished banner with a shield and replace the wood pattern with the banner. This is especially useful if you want your own shield or belong to a specific faction. Keep in mind that the pattern will be somewhat reduced in size and won’t look exactly like the original banner. Still, it’s cool!

Secondly, you can use banners as markers for maps, which is super practical! We’ve already made a complete post on cartography if you want to learn more about it (Effective Navigation in Minecraft: Using Compass and Map) . To keep track, you should rename the corresponding banners in an anvil beforehand. Place it at the desired location and right-click on it with the map. The banner will appear with its base color and name on the map. You can remove it by clicking on it again.

Conclusion

Banners offer incredible variety, with millions of combinations of colors and patterns at your disposal. Plus, it’s fun to hunt down all ten rare patterns and integrate them into your loom. Rent one of our Minecraft servers and explore the colorful world of banners together with your friends. You can even create your own flag for your server!