5 Best Uses of Shears in Minecraft

Shears look like the most boring tool in Minecraft. Two iron ingots, a pair of blades, no combat stats worth mentioning. Yet an entire layer of the game quietly depends on them, because shears are the only tool that harvests certain things intact instead of destroying them. If you have never given them much thought, these five uses should change that.

1. Shear Mobs Instead of Killing Them

The namesake job is still the best one. Right-click a sheep with shears and you walk away with up to three wool while the sheep walks away unharmed, ready to regrow its coat the moment it grazes on grass. Compare that with killing it for a single piece and the maths is obvious, especially once dispensers enter the picture in an automatic wool farm.

Sheep are only the start. Shears collect three honeycombs from a full beehive or bee nest (place a campfire underneath first, unless you enjoy being chased). They turn a mooshroom back into an ordinary cow while handing you five mushrooms, they remove the carved pumpkin hiding a snow golem's real face, and they are the only way to take wolf armor off a tamed wolf. You can even carve a pumpkin with them, gaining four pumpkin seeds and a jack o'lantern shell in one click.

2. Harvest Blocks That Only Shears Can Collect

A whole family of blocks drops nothing, or drops the wrong thing, unless shears are involved. The headline examples:

• Cobweb — a fist gets nothing and a sword gets string; shears give you the cobweb block itself.
• Leaves, vines, ferns and short grass — all collectable as placeable blocks only with shears.
• Dead bush, seagrass, glow lichen and hanging roots — the same story for decoration hunters.
• Twisting and weeping vines — shears guarantee the drop instead of leaving it to chance.
• Tripwire — cutting it with shears disarms the trap silently, without sending a redstone signal to whatever nasty surprise it powers.

3. Stop Vines Growing at Exactly the Right Length

Builders, this one is for you. Snipping the tip of a cave vine, kelp stalk, weeping vine or twisting vine with shears stops that plant from growing any further. Instead of every decorative vine in your build eventually reaching the floor at the same length, you can freeze each one at precisely the height you wanted and keep the design intact forever.

4. Remove Saddles, Harnesses and Leashes

Shears have recently picked up a tidy new job: taking tack off animals. You can now snip the saddle off a horse, donkey or pig instead of digging through menus, cut a leash off a mob or the fence it is tied to, and remove the harness from a happy ghast. Combined with the older wolf armor trick, shears have become the universal 'take it off' tool for anything an animal can wear.

5. Let Dispensers Do the Shearing

Place shears in a dispenser and it will shear whatever is in front of it when triggered: a sheep penned against it, or a beehive ready for harvest. If nothing shearable is in front, the dispenser fires harmlessly and the shears lose no durability at all. That little detail is what makes fully automatic wool and honeycomb farms possible, and it is the reason this humble tool earns a permanent slot in so many redstone builds.