All 16 Dyes in Minecraft and How to Get Them

Colour is half of building in Minecraft, and every coloured block starts with dye. There are 16 dyes in the game, and they fall into three families: dyes you harvest directly from the world, dyes you smelt, and dyes that only exist because you mixed two others together. Here is every single one, where it comes from, and what to do with the lot of them.

All 16 Dyes and How to Get Each One

A few patterns make the whole system easy to remember. Most flower dyes come from the flower forests and plains where those flowers grow, and most mixed dyes follow ordinary colour logic — red and yellow make orange, blue and red make purple. White is the great lightener: add it to black, green, blue or red and you get the pale version of each. And if gathering feels slow, a wandering trader will sell three of any dye for a single emerald, while shepherd villagers trade in dyes in bulk once levelled up.

The rarest of the sixteen is brown: cocoa beans generate only on jungle tree trunks, so until you have found a jungle, brown is off the menu. Green is the odd one out in the other direction — no flower provides it, and you must always smelt cactus, which at least grows abundantly in deserts and badlands.

What Dyes Are Used For

• Wool and sheep — dye wool blocks directly, or dye the sheep itself and shear coloured wool forever
• Terracotta — one dye ringed by eight terracotta stains all eight blocks at once
• Glass — the same 8-and-1 pattern makes stained glass and panes
• Concrete powder — dye is a mandatory ingredient, and the colour cannot be changed afterwards
• Beds, candles and shulker boxes — combine any of them with a dye to recolour them
• Leather armour — dyed in a crafting grid on Java, or in a cauldron of coloured water on Bedrock
• Banners — dyes drive every pattern you apply at a loom
• Firework stars — up to eight dyes set the colours of the explosion
• Signs — use dye on sign text to colour it, and a glow ink sac to make it shine

One efficient habit ties it all together: dye the sheep, not the wool. A dyed sheep regrows its colour after every shearing, so a single dye can pay out indefinitely — which is exactly why the automatic wool farm keeps one dyed sheep per colour.