Banners are the standard way to put a flag, a team color or a guild mark on a Minecraft server. You craft one from wool, then add patterns at a loom. The recipes are below, with the patterns that need extra items and where those items come from in Java Edition.
Checked against the Minecraft 26.3 server data and the Minecraft Wiki, with the key figures confirmed on a second wiki, October 2026.
Craft a banner
A banner takes six wool of one color and one stick. Lay the wool in two rows of three and put the stick below the middle, the same layout as a sign. The banner takes the wool's color, and there are 16 colors.
You can place a banner on the ground or on a wall. It has no collision, so players and mobs walk straight through it.
Craft a loom
A loom needs 2 string with 2 planks of any type directly below them. You can also find looms in village shepherd houses.
Add patterns at the loom
- Open the loom and put the banner and a dye in their slots.
- Pick a pattern from the list in the middle.
- Take the finished banner from the output slot. The banner and the dye are used up.
A banner can hold up to 6 layers of patterns, and each layer takes any of the 16 dye colors. The patterns that need only dye include stripes, corner squares, crosses, triangles, diagonals, the circle, the rhombus, the half fields, the border and the gradients.
Ten patterns also need a banner pattern item in the loom's pattern slot. The item is not used up, so one item serves for as many banners as you like. These are Flower Charge, Creeper Charge, Skull Charge, Thing, Snout, Globe, Field Masoned, Bordure Indented, Flow and Guster.
Get the banner pattern items
Six of the ten are crafted with 1 paper and one other ingredient:
The other four cannot be crafted:
- Globe is sold by a master-level cartographer villager for 8 emeralds.
- Snout is found in chests in bastion remnants.
- Flow comes from an ominous vault in a trial chamber.
- Guster comes from a vault in a trial chamber.
Wash, copy and reuse banners
- Wash a layer off. Use a banner on a cauldron that holds water to remove its top layer, which is the last pattern you added.
- Copy a design. A patterned banner crafted together with a blank banner of the same base color makes more banners with the same design.
- Put it on a shield. Craft a banner with a shield to carry the design. The shield shows it at a smaller size, so it can look slightly different.
- Mark a map. In Java Edition, use a map on a standing banner to add a marker for its position.
Villagers sell blank banners too, and an illager carrying an ominous banner always drops it when it dies.
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