Taking Inventory: Carpet

To get carpet, you’ll need two wool blocks in whatever colour of carpet you want. Put them together horizontally in any size of crafting grid, and you’ll get three carpet tiles. You can also use dye to change the colour of an already-crafted carpet. 

If for some reason you’re not into crafting, then (a) why are you playing Minecraft?, but (b) don’t worry – you can harvest carpets of different colours from a few different places in the world: igloos, woodland mansions, villages, and ancient cities. They can also be bought from shepherd villagers.

Got some? Great – let’s talk about what you can do with it. First and most obviously, you can use them to make your floors pretty. But that’s not all. They let light through, so you can use them to hide light-generating blocks on the floor. They stop mobs from spawning on top. Oh, and hoppers can collect items through carpet too.

Most excitingly though, you can use carpets to customize your llama train. That’s right – by popping a carpet in the carpet slot in a llama’s inventory, you’ll add a patterned rug on the llama’s back – and there are 16 different designs for each of the 16 different colours. Snazzy!

While Minecraft’s carpets date back to 2013, carpets in the real world go back at least 2500 years. The earliest surviving example is the Pazyryk carpet, found in a burial mound in Siberia, which dates from the 5th or 4th century BC. Amazingly it’s still looking pretty good – dyed bright red with cochineal beetles.

The word “carpet” comes from the Latin “carpita” and old Italian “carpire”, meaning “to pluck”. It arrived in English in the late 13th century, originally meaning “coarse cloth”, and then evolving to mean “tablecloth” or “bedspread”by the mid 14th century. It wasn’t until the 15th century that it began to refer to floor coverings.

Whatever you call it – carpet, carpita, carpire – you can bet that there probably isn’t a carpet too far away from you right now. They’re used in cultures across the world to make floors warmer and more comfortable. So why not apply that principle to your home in Minecraft? A lovely bit of carpet, you can bet, will sweep your guests off their feet.