Block of the Month: Decorated Pot

Why? Well, to make a decorated pot, you’ll need either pottery sherds or bricks. Bricks are easy to make, but plain. Pottery sherds are harder to acquire – you’ll need to grab a brush and hunt for archeological remains – but the results are much more beautiful. Either way, you’ll need four in total.

Place those four into a crafting grid in a diamond pattern and you’ll be rewarded with a decorated pot. But be careful! The side textures of the pot will correspond with what items you put where. If you have one sherd and three bricks, one face will be decorated. Two and two gives two decorated faces, and so on. The one you put in the bottom slot is the one that’ll face you when you place the pot down, so make that the prettiest

Once you’ve made your pot, place it somewhere attractive in your home and go about your business. Every now and then you’ll notice it again and be reminded of the beauty of this world. You can even put a flowerpot on top with a flower in, making it look like the flower is inside the large pot. Isn’t that nice? Time to get rid of it? Just break it to drop the component parts you used to craft it.

In Earth’s history, cultures have been making pots and other ceramics for more than 25,000 years but decoration didn’t become common until perhaps 7,000-8,000 years ago, during the Neolithic era.

Some of the best-known ancient decorated pots come from the “red-figure” pottery of the ancient Greeks – where the background is painted black while the figures and other details are left as the natural color of the clay. This innovation swiftly replaced the “black-figure” style that came before it.

Today, ceramic art is found all over the world in almost every culture. Nearly all of the world’s ceramics are mass-produced in large factories, but there’s still a strong tradition of hand-made, small-scale items that are decorated with care and love, and of passing beautiful pieces down the generations.

So when you’re ready to give up your Minecraft world and start anew, consider passing your most beautiful decorated pots down to a nearby friendly villager. They’ll be sure to treasure them as much as you did!