How to make a banner in Minecraft: 6 wool, 1 stick, then the loom
The 26.3 banner recipe, the 42 patterns a loom can add and the 10 that need a pattern item, where each item comes from, and how to copy, undo and map-mark a banner.
A banner is six wool of one colour over a single stick. There are 16 banner recipes in the Java 26.3 datapack, one per colour; white_banner.json is typical:
# # # # = minecraft:white_wool (all six the same colour)
# # # | = minecraft:stick
| → 1 × minecraft:white_bannerThe wool decides the banner's base colour, and it cannot be changed afterwards — there is no recipe that re-dyes a finished banner. Re-dye the wool instead: any wool plus a dye in a crafting grid becomes wool of that dye's colour.
The loom: one pattern per dye
Everything past the base colour is done on a loom (two string above two planks). Put in the banner and a dye, pick a pattern, and take the result. Each layer costs one dye; the banner is returned with the layer added.
The 26.3 data has 43 banner patterns. One of them, base, is the background colour itself, which leaves 42 that a loom can paint:
- 32 need nothing but the dye — stripes, corners, halves, diagonals, borders, crosses, gradients, triangles, the circle and the rhombus. They sit in the tag
#minecraft:no_item_required. - 10 only appear once a banner pattern item is in the loom's third slot.
The pattern item is not used up, so one of each is enough for a lifetime of banners.
The loom stops at six layers: once a banner carries six patterns it will not take a seventh. Commands can put more on a banner, but then the crafting-grid copy described below no longer works on it.
The 10 pattern items and where each comes from
| pattern item | pattern | how to get it |
|---|---|---|
| Flower Charge | flower | craft: paper + oxeye daisy |
| Creeper Charge | creeper | craft: paper + creeper head |
| Skull Charge | skull | craft: paper + wither skeleton skull |
| Thing | mojang | craft: paper + enchanted golden apple |
| Field Masoned | bricks | craft: paper + bricks |
| Bordure Indented | curly_border | craft: paper + vines |
| Globe | globe | master cartographer, 8 emeralds — every master offers it |
| Snout | piglin | ordinary bastion remnant chests, about 1 in 10 |
| Flow | flow | ominous vaults, 15% per vault |
| Guster | guster | normal trial vaults, about 4% per vault |
The last two are the rare ones. A normal vault only rolls its unique pool a quarter of the time, and the Guster pattern is 2 of 12 weight in it; an ominous vault rolls its unique pool 75% of the time with Flow at 2 of 10.
Copying a banner
Copies are made on a crafting table, not a loom: put the patterned banner next to a blank banner of the same base colour. The blank one becomes an exact copy and the original stays in the grid. The source can have between one and six layers — the recipe refuses anything with more, which is the one practical difference between a survival banner and a command-built one.
Undoing a layer
Use a banner on a water cauldron and it loses its top layer, one layer per use, at the cost of one level of water. There is no way to remove a layer from the middle of the stack, so a mistake three layers down means washing off three.
Other things a banner does
- Map markers: use a filled map on a placed banner and it appears on that map as a marker in the banner's colour, labelled with its name if you renamed it in an anvil.
- Shields: a banner crafted together with an undecorated shield puts the whole design on the shield.
- Buying plain ones: expert cartographers can sell blank banners for 2 emeralds; which colours depends on the villager's biome type.
Designing six layers by trial and error costs dye, so plan them first. The Banner Designer previews each layer live, lists the loom steps in order and gives the /give command for the finished banner.