How to Make a Banner in Minecraft

Banners are one of the most decorative blocks in Minecraft. A plain banner looks simple enough, but it is really a blank canvas: you can mark your base, claim territory on a server, decorate a castle wall, or carry your own colours into battle. Before any of that, though, you need the banner itself. Here is how crafting one works, where the game hides free ones, and how to buy them instead.

What You Need to Craft a Banner

The recipe asks for just two ingredients:

• 6 wool blocks, all the same colour
• 1 stick

The fastest way to stock up on wool is shearing sheep, since a sheared sheep regrows its coat and can be sheared again. If you want a coloured banner, dye the wool first — all six blocks have to match, so dye them before you craft rather than after. Sticks come from wooden planks, so a couple of logs cover that side of the recipe easily.

The Banner Crafting Recipe

Open a crafting table and arrange the items like this:

1. Fill the entire top row with wool.
2. Fill the entire middle row with wool as well.
3. Place the stick in the centre slot of the bottom row.

The banner appears in the result slot, in whatever colour your wool was. Since the 1.21 update you can also feed the same recipe into a crafter, as long as it receives a redstone signal to spit the banner out — handy if you are mass-producing banners for a big build.

Where Banners Generate Naturally

If you would rather skip the sheep, the world generates banners in several structures, and some of them already carry patterns:

The ominous banner deserves a special mention. The illager captains who carry it drop it with a 100% chance when killed, so winning a fight against a patrol is the most reliable way to get one. Just remember that picking it up and walking into a village is exactly how raids start.

Buying Banners from Villagers

Shepherd and cartographer villagers both sell banners as part of their trades, with prices starting at around three emeralds. Levelling up a shepherd is a solid long-term plan if you decorate a lot, because wool and banner trades keep your supply chain short. Between crafting, looting structures, and trading, you should never be short of a banner when a build needs one — so pick your colours and start marking your territory.

Putting Your Banner to Work

A plain banner is only the starting point. Take it to a loom with some dye and you can layer patterns over it — stripes, crosses, borders, and symbols — which is how players design clan flags and shop signs. Your finished design can also be applied to a shield, so the pattern you built is the one you carry into a fight. Around a base, banners work as wall hangings, table cloths on a frame, and markers that tell visitors (and rivals) exactly whose territory they are standing in.