Block of the Week: Loom

Looms were added to Minecraft in the Village & Pillage update in April 2019. There are two ways to get your grubby hands on them - the first is to craft one with two planks and two string arranged in a square in a crafting grid. 

The second is to steal one from a shepherd’s house in a village. I do not recommend doing this because stealing is wrong and it’s not like planks and string are hard to get hold of, is it?

Once you’ve acquired a loom, by fair means or foul, you’re going to want to hit the “use” button on it. A complicated interface pops up, but don’t worry because I’m going to walk you through it. On the left side there are three slots - the leftmost holds your banner, the rightmost holds your dye, and the bottom slot lets you put in an optional banner pattern item.

Put the banner and the dye in, and you’ll see a list of patterns in the middle - these are mostly geometric designs - stripes, crosses, and a few basic shapes. Pick one you like, take the banner out and you’re good to go. 

But here’s the fun bit - you can put the banner in again to layer more designs over the top - with a different colour if you like. And certain banner patterns will add even more options to choose from. So you can actually build up some quite complicated and interesting designs. Here’s a site that catalogues some nice ones.

Looms are also used to make banners in the real world, but more broadly they’re used to weave cloth and they’ve been in use for millennia. 

In a loom, you start with a bunch of threads that are stretched out parallel to each other. These are called “warp” threads. Slowly, with the help of the machine, the person using the loom then weaves “weft” threads in between them, creating a tight grid that holds together under its own tension. Do that over and over again and voila! You’ve got cloth. If you want to get fancy, you can change the colours in the process, creating nifty designs.

Over the centuries, there have been huge improvements in the efficiency of this basic process through technology. While weaving cloth was once a difficult and time-consuming process, usually done by women, children or even slaves, today it’s largely automated in huge machines.

There are no huge machines in Minecraft, but luckily the loom block does most of the hard work for you - just pick a design, pick a colour and away you go. Send us your most beautiful banner designs on Twitter at @Minecraft!