How to make banners in Minecraft

Banners are an interesting item in Minecraft. They are made up of wool and can have absolutely gorgeous designs placed on them through the loom Minecraft villager profession workstation. These flags wave gently in the breeze no matter what and can even be placed halfway into blocks, if done right, to add even more potential uses while building.

This begs the question of how to make banners in Minecraft, which is detailed below, along with where to find the few naturally generated kinds of banners, the mobs that provide banners, and their other uses.

How To Make Banners In Minecraft? Banner Crafting Recipe

1) Collect wood

Finding trees to cut down shouldn't be too hard (Image via Mojang Studios)

The first thing you'll need to do to make some banners is collect the necessary resources. The first resource to get is wood, as it's probably more easily accessible than wool. If you already have a Minecraft survival base set up then only a single log is needed, as only a single stick is required. Otherwise, grab a second log to also make a crafting table.

2) Get wool

Even a simple sheep farm should produce enough wool (Image via Mojang Studios)

The next step is to get and dye whatever wool color you want to make banners from. Getting the wool should be easy, as even a simple Minecraft sheep farm consisting of a fence and manual breeding whenever the cooldown runs out should provide plenty of wool. However, getting the dyes can be harder, depending on which of Minecraft's many dye colors are needed.

Six pieces of wool are needed per banner, and every banner must be constructed entirely of the same wool color.

3) Craft a banner

The banner's crafting recipe is thankfully quite cheap (Image via Mojang Studios)

Crafting a banner once its materials have been gathered is easy. Enter a crafting interface and place the stick in the bottom middle spot of the grid. Then, place six pieces of wool above this stick in a 2x3 pattern, almost as if making a wool trapdoor above the stick. Then grab the banner out of the output.

Keep in mind that, unlike regular wool, banners can't be dyed once crafted, so the right color of wool is needed when crafting them.

These banners can then have up to six layers of dyed patterns applied to them at a loom, which is where most of their customization comes from.

How to get banners from Mobs?

Cartographers are a guaranteed banner source (Image via Mojang Studios)

Crafting banners isn't the only way to get Minecraft banners. If sheep are seemingly extinct in your world, that's okay. Instead, train up some Minecraft villagers to trade with.

On Java Edition, expert-level cartographers will always sell one or two random blank banner colors for three emeralds. Additionally, expert-level shepherds have a 2/7 chance of having the same trade. Shepherds also trade wool, though, allowing for banners to be crafted, as mentioned.

On Bedrock, expert-level cartographers and shepherds both offer a single banner for trade for three emeralds. This might seem worse, but they are both guaranteed trades, and being able to buy both wool and banners from a single villager is nice.

There's also a unique type of banner dropped by wandering illager raid captains outside of actual raid events. These banners depict illagers and are called ominous banners on Java and illager banners on Bedrock. Raid captains are guaranteed to drop this banner upon death.

Where to find naturally generated banners?

Mansions are the best place to find banners due to having three different types (Image via Mojang Studios)

The other way to get a banner in Minecraft is to find one that's generated naturally. Five different structures generate them, with each banner being different in color and pattern. The full table is as follows:

Type of Banner	Structure and Location
Magenta Banner	Outside of end cities
Gray Banner	In banner rooms in woodland mansions
Light Gray Banner	In master bedrooms in woodland mansions
Brown Banner	Outside of some houses, meeting points, and pillar fountains in savanna villages
Black Banner	In altar rooms in woodland mansions

Collecting banners found within any of these structures is simple, as they require no tools to drop when broken. However, axes will break banners faster than other tools, so it might be safer to use an axe for quick looting runs into Minecraft's most dangerous structures.

Uses for banners

Map markers are the most useful feature for banners outside of decoration (Image via Mojang Studios)

The most obvious use for banners is as decoration, as their aesthetic and customizability imply they can fit into any number of amazing Minecraft builds. But there's much more to them than just being nice to look at.

The first of these uses is to customize a shield. Combining a shield with a banner will cause the banner to apply over the face of the shield, pattern, and all. This gives a ton of cool customization to shields.

The next use is actually getting more of a specific banner. If two banners of the same color, one blank and one patterned, are combined, the blank one will have the pattern copied over.

Banners can also be placed on maps. This is done by interacting with a banner while holding a map. This will mark the banner's location on the map as a waypoint. This marker is removed if the banner is broken, unless the map has been locked. This feature is exclusive to Java, but with Minecraft Bedrock's many recent parity updates, this could change at any time.

Some random, smaller, nice use cases are that banners can burn in a furnace, providing enough fuel to smelt 1.5 items. Banners can also be placed under note blocks to produce bass sounds.

How to customize Banners in Minecraft

Customized banners in Minecraft (Image via Mojang)

Banners are among the many features where fans can show their creativity in Minecraft. All banners in Minecraft are customizable, allowing players to make cool banner patterns, ranging from custom flags to alphabets.

To customize a banner in Minecraft, you will need to craft a loom. This workstation block is pretty simple to craft. You need two strings and two wooden planks to craft a loom. A loom comes with three slots: one for the banner, the second for dye, and a third optional slot for a banner pattern item.

The loom comes with various in-built patterns, allowing you to create different patterns on banners. You can stack up to six patterns on one banner. With a little creativity, players can create pretty cool designs on their banners in Minecraft. However, for those lacking creativity, Mojang has provided some items to add cool banner patterns easily. Players can combine the following items with paper to make banner patterns:

Oxeye daisy to make a flower pattern
Creeper skull to make a creeper pattern
Wither skeleton skull to make a skull pattern
Enchanted golden apple to make the former Mojang logo pattern

Other than these, players can also discover the following banner patterns for customizing banners in Minecraft:

Snout banner pattern from bastion remnants
Gobe banner pattern from cartographer villagers
Flow and guster banner pattern from trial chambers