Wool

Wool is a block derived from sheep that can be dyed 16 different colors. Wool blocks are weak, very flammable, and do not offer much resistance against explosions. As of the Beta 1.2 update, white, light gray, gray, and black wool can be obtained naturally by shearing sheep, and as of the 1.4 patch, brown and pink sheep can spawn naturally throughout the world. Sheep have a 5% chance to be black, 5% chance to be gray, 5% chance to be light gray, 3% chance to be brown, and a 0.2% chance to be pink. White wool can also be created by combining 4 pieces of string together, which can be found in dungeons or obtained by killing spiders, although harvesting wool from sheep is considered a better use of the player's time.

It is possible to shear sheep from afar with a fishing rod without hurting them, making wool easier to harvest. Sheep are shorn in one hit regardless of what is equipped. Wool blocks are quick to remove, however using a sword will speed up the removal slightly, at the cost of 2 uses.

Jeb mentioned on Twitter that he was working on shears, which may be an upcoming tool for quickly removing wool and/or shearing sheep.

History
Wool was added for the creation of paintings, carpeting, colorful structures, and in-game pixel art. Wool is also a suitable material for docks, as wool blocks will stop boats and absorb some impact from the collisions in a manner similar to Soul Sand.

In Creative Classic mode, wool blocks were known as cloth blocks that came in a set of 16 colours, although the palette was slightly different from the one available in Beta. Three shades of gray were added in Classic 0.0.20a.

Except for white cloth, colored cloth blocks were unobtainable during Classic's Survival Test and Indev unless they were pre-placed into the map file. They were completely removed from the code in Infdev. Placing these blocks on the map would cause the game client to crash, since the blocks no longer existed.

When colored wool was introduced again in Beta 1.2, they were renamed from cloth blocks to wool blocks.

Before Beta 1.6.6, Wool required 9 pieces of string to craft.

Efficiency
By right clicking on sheep with a dye, the sheep will be colored in that dye. When hit, they drop 1-3 blocks of the colored wool, allowing more than crafting colored wool, thus giving only 1.

Crafting
*: Using strings to make wool is not recommended, as string is much harder to find compared to wool unless an efficient mob farm is made.

As a Crafting Ingredient
Note: Any color of wool may be used in these crafting recipes, however the color has no effect on the color of the product.

Colored Wool
The wool and dye can be placed anywhere in the crafting grid.

Data Values for Colored Wool
Different colors of wool can also be obtained by adjusting the "damage" values in the inventory. * Turns to white wool when placed

Trivia



 * Before leather was added, wool was used to craft leather armor.
 * When destroying wool, white wool debris is seen despite what color the dyed wool is.
 * It is recommended not to use string to make wool, as wool is easily obtainable but string is harder to obtain as it is only dropped by Spiders and found in Dungeons.
 * You will get more colored wool with one dye if you use it to color sheep and then hit them, causing the sheep to drop 1-3 wool blocks instead of just crafting one colored wool per dye.
 * You can't dye non-white wool, but you can dye non-white sheep.
 * The naturally occurring colors on sheep are black, white, brown, light gray, and gray. There are also pink sheep, although they are quite rare.
 * The damage values for the wool and the dyes are the inverse of each other.
 * It is possible to kill sheep without shearing them by lighting them on fire. However, this is pointless and yields nothing.
 * Finding wool randomly on the ground on singleplayer means wolves were there, or that the sheep took fall damage.
 * Mobs, including hostile mobs at night, can spawn on placed wool blocks.
 * The only way to get the purple error block is to use an inventory hack. It does not have the same texture as a normal wool block when held, but if placed will turn into normal white wool. It is unknown why this block is in the game but its texture looks like the background of the terrain.png file.