Taking Inventory: Shears

But far-too-fluffy sheep aren’t the only thing you can shear in Minecraft! You can shear cobwebs! Leaves! Tall grass! Seagrass! All kinds of ferns! Dead bushes! Vines! Mooshrooms, red or brown! Tripwires! Pumpkins! Snow golems! And even bees! The shear size of that list is impressive.

Like most tools they have a durability, but they can be upgraded at an anvil with enchantments - efficiency, unbreaking, mending, silk touch, and curse of vanishing, depending a little on which version of Minecraft you’re playing.

In the real world, the word “shears” can refer to all sorts of things – but mostly things that cut. There are hair-cutting shears, animal shears, grass shears, kitchen shears for cutting food, pinking shears for cutting in a zig-zag pattern, garden shears for pruning plants, and even shears for paramedics to cut clothes off injured people.

The earliest shears appeared in Mesopotamia, somewhere around 2000 to 1000 BC. They were made of two bronze blades, connected by a thin flexible strip of curved bronze which allowed them to be squeezed together. This design was common all the way up until the 16th century.

In about 100 AD, however, the Romans invented a new kind of shears – where the blades were connected above half way between the tips and the handles – more like a modern pair of scissors. These weren’t manufactured in any large numbers until 1761, when a man named Robert Hinchcliffe started making them in bulk. Today, almost all real-world scissors are made this way, which is shear perfection.

But there’s never been a Robert Hinchcliffe in Minecraft, so we still have shears. Maybe one day a smart villager will invent steel, and then another one will invent scissors. Until then, we’re doing things the old-fashioned way!