Decorated pots: all 23 sherds, where each one digs up, and the give command
A pot takes four sherds, one per face, and the order you place them decides which face gets which. Where every sherd comes from and how to skip the digging.
A decorated pot is four items arranged in a diamond. What most people get wrong is which slot maps to which face.
Crafting layout maps to faces
[ back ]
[ left ] [ right ]
[front ]Top slot is the back, bottom is the front, and the pot faces you when placed. So the sherd you want visible goes in the bottom slot. Building the design in the order you read it produces a pot showing the wrong face.
Any face can be a plain brick instead of a sherd — that is how you make a pot with one decorated side.
Where sherds come from
Twenty of the 23 are found by brushing suspicious sand or suspicious gravel, and each structure has its own subset. The other three come from breaking the decorated pots built into Trial Chambers:
| Structure | Sherds |
|---|---|
| Desert Well | Arms Up, Brewer |
| Desert Pyramid | Archer, Miner, Prize, Skull |
| Ocean Ruins (cold) | Blade, Explorer, Mourner, Plenty |
| Ocean Ruins (warm) | Angler, Shelter, Snort |
| Trail Ruins (rare loot) | Burn, Danger, Friend, Heart, Heartbreak, Howl, Sheaf |
| Trial Chambers | Flow, Guster, Scrape (break the decorated pots) |
Trail Ruins is the richest brushing source and the only place seven of them appear. Flow, Guster and Scrape are the newest three and are the ones people hunt — and no brush finds them.
Brushing turns the block back into ordinary sand or gravel, so a suspicious block yields one item and one chance. Do not break them with a pickaxe.
Pots as containers
A decorated pot holds one stack — a single slot. That, plus the comparator reading its fullness, makes it a compact filter or counter in redstone.
Breaking a pot with a pickaxe shatters it and returns the four sherds. Breaking it with Silk Touch keeps the pot whole with its design intact, which is how you move one.
The give command
/give @p decorated_pot[pot_decorations={front:"minecraft:angler_pottery_sherd"}]The component names each side — back, left, right, front — and any side you leave out is plain brick. The four-item list older guides show is no longer accepted.
Flag banners are the same idea
The other half of this tool is country-flag banners: a base colour plus an ordered layer list. The same layering rule applies as in any banner — the last pattern is on top — and most national flags come out in three to six layers, which is inside the loom's cap.
Design a pot from four sherds, browse every sherd pattern, and build flag banner layer lists in the Pottery Sherds & Flag Banners tool.