How to Make Shears in Minecraft

Shears might be the best-value tool in Minecraft. Two pieces of iron buy you a tool that gathers wool peacefully, snips leaves and vines into usable blocks, defuses tripwires and harvests honeycomb without angering a single bee. They wear out fairly fast, but at this price you can always carry a spare.

What You Need to Make Shears

Just two iron ingots. Smelt raw iron or iron ore in a furnace to get them, or check structure chests — ingots turn up in plenty of loot. The recipe fits in your 2×2 inventory grid, so you do not even need a crafting table.

The Shears Crafting Recipe

Place one iron ingot in the bottom-left slot of the grid and the second ingot diagonally opposite it, in the top-right slot. The shears appear in the result box. The mirrored layout works too — top-left and bottom-right — but the two ingots must sit on a diagonal. Line them up side by side or stacked and nothing happens; this recipe is not shapeless, which is the usual reason it seems to "not work."

Other Ways to Get Shears

If iron is scarce, shepherds have you covered. A novice shepherd villager sells shears for two emeralds — in Bedrock this trade is always available, while in Java it appears about 40% of the time. Shepherd houses in villages also contain chests with roughly a 12% chance of holding shears.

What Shears Are Actually For

• Wool without the killing. Right-click a sheep to shear it, yielding 1–3 wool while the sheep lives to regrow its coat by eating grass.
• Blocks you cannot get any other way. Leaves, vines, glow lichen, tall grass, ferns and dead bushes only drop as items when cut with shears (or a Silk Touch tool).
• Honeycomb. Use shears on a full bee nest or beehive to collect honeycomb — put a lit campfire beneath it first so the bees stay calm.
• Safe redstone work. Shears cut tripwire without triggering it, and they are the tool for carving pumpkins into jack o'lantern faces and carved pumpkins for snow golems.
• Mob grooming. Shearing a mooshroom removes its mushrooms and turns it back into an ordinary cow, and shears remove a snow golem's carved pumpkin if you want its plain face back.

Shears also pair with dispensers: a dispenser holding shears will automatically shear sheep in front of it, which is the heart of every automatic wool farm.

Enchanting Shears

Shears accept Unbreaking, Mending, Efficiency and Curse of Vanishing — but only through enchanted books on an anvil. The enchanting table refuses them entirely. Efficiency V is surprisingly worthwhile: it makes wool blocks break instantly. Unbreaking III stretches the modest 238 durability a long way, since shears normally lose one point per use. Bedrock players can also add Silk Touch via a book, though it changes very little in practice.

Given the trivial recipe, most players simply craft fresh shears as needed and save their enchanted books for bigger gear — but a Mending pair in your farming kit is a small luxury worth having.