Wool is a block obtained from Sheep, which can be dyed 16 different colors. Wool can also be made from four pieces of String. Wool blocks are weak and flammable and do not offer much resistance against explosions.
Overview
Any color of wool can be obtained from a sheep of the respective color. Killing a sheep always yields 1 wool, while shearing it yields 1 - 3 wool without needing to kill it. A shorn sheep regrows its wool coat by eating grass. Sheep can be permanently dyed any color, making the wool it produces to be that color too. The natural colors of sheep found in the world are white, brown, gray, light gray, and pink. The chances of a sheep spawning in these colors are:
- White (81.836%)
- Black (5%)
- Gray (5%)
- Light Gray (5%)
- Brown (3%)
- Pink (0.164%)
White wool can also be crafted with a 2x2 square of string. This allows gathering wool from spiders and abandoned mineshafts in otherwise sheepless environments.
Uses
- Wool can be used for aesthetic reasons, as a decorative, colorful surface anywhere that is not close to Lava or Fire.
- Wool can be combined with other ingredients in a Crafting Table to make a Bed, Carpet, Banner, or Painting.
- Wool can be used as Fuel in a Furnace, but it is not very effective, as each piece will only smelt half an item.
- Wool can be sold to shepherd villagers in exchange for an emerald.
Crafting
| Wool | ||
|---|---|---|
| String | String | None |
| String | String | None |
| None | None | None |
| Carpet | Bed (Wool colours must match as of 1.12) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wool | Wool | None | Wool | Wool | Wool | |
| None | None | None | Wood Planks | Wood Planks | Wood Planks | |
| None | None | None | None | None | None | |
| Banner | Painting | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wool | Wool | Wool | Stick | Stick | Stick | |
| Wool | Wool | Wool | Stick | Wool | Stick | |
| None | Stick | None | Stick | Stick | Stick | |
History
Wool was added for the creation of paintings, carpet, colorful structures, and in-game pixel art.
In Creative Classic mode, wool blocks were known as "cloth" blocks that came in a set of 16 colors, 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 Infdev, 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 re-introduced in Beta 1.2, cloth blocks were renamed "wool" blocks.
In update 1.12, wool was updated to be more vibrant in color. It also required the wool for crafting beds to be of the same color.
As of 1.14, white wool generates as part of Pillager Outpost tents.
Colored Wool
There are 16 different colors of wool listed here, along with their IDs and values (for use in commands):
| Wool Color | Value | ID |
|---|---|---|
| White | 0 | white |
| Orange | 1 | orange |
| Magenta | 2 | magenta |
| Light Blue | 3 | light_blue |
| Yellow | 4 | yellow |
| Lime | 5 | lime |
| Pink | 6 | pink |
| Gray | 7 | gray |
| Light Gray | 8 | silver |
| Cyan | 9 | cyan |
| Purple | 10 | purple |
| Blue | 11 | blue |
| Brown | 12 | brown |
| Green | 13 | green |
| Red | 14 | red |
| Black | 15 | black |
Colored wool is made from dyes and any color wool. The position of the wool and dye in the crafting square doesn't matter.
Efficiency
The most efficient and sustainable way to gather colored wool is to first dye a sheep the desired color, and then repeatedly shear the sheep each time the colored wool grows back. A sheep can be dyed by right-clicking on it with dye in hand (in PC). The sheep will remain the dyed color until it is either killed or dyed a different color. When sheared, the sheep will drop 1-3 blocks of the colored wool.
Mining
Wool can be harvested with any tool or by hand, but shears are the fastest.
| Tool | 
|
|---|---|
| Hardness | 0.8 |
| Breaking time[note 1] | |
| Default | 1.2 |
| Shears | 0.25 |
- ↑ Times are for unenchanted tools in seconds.
Trivia
- Wool was used to create the Shield in Minecraft 1.9 snapshots.
- This was changed to require wooden planks and an iron ingot instead.
- Wool was going to be used to create Horse Armor, but its crafting recipe was removed.
- The crafting recipe for wool was changed in Beta 1.6. Every update before Minecraft Beta 1.6 required 9 pieces of string instead of 4.
- Wool was going to be used to craft Horse Saddles, but the item, along with the crafting recipe, was removed in the full release of 1.6.
- Naturally-occurring brown and pink sheep did not appear in Minecraft until update 1.4.
- Wool was formerly named cloth and was formerly used in crafting cloth armor. The cloth armor feature was most likely replaced by leather armor.
- When a sheep is named jeb_, it will turn rainbow not drop rainbow wool, only the color that it originally was before named.
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