How-to Make a Shield in Minecraft

Our Minecraft: How-to Make a Shield Guide features a quick look at the recipes required for creating a shield! This is a very useful piece of equipment when you are heading into caves, dungeons, or other dangerous parts of the map. If you're heading to the Nether or even further beyond, don't forget to pack a shield or two with you.

Shield Recipe

What you need to gather is six wooden planks of any type and one iron bar. Once you've got that gathered, head to your Crafting Table and place the wooden planks in a Y shape with the iron bar in the top middle. It should look like this:

That's all you need to create a shield! You can now equip it in the left-handed slot where you can place your equipment.

Customizing Your Shield

If you want to add some flair to your shield, you can actually customize how it looks by combining it with a banner. Banners can be found and created, you can also dye the wool that you create the banner out of to give it a different color. Here's the recipe for a banner:

You can find banners around the world as well, these have different patterns and will really give your shield some style!

• Black Banner - Woodland Mansions
• Brown Banner - Outside of houses, meeting points, or in savanna villages
• Gray Banner - Woodland Mansions
• Light Gray Banner - Woodland Mansions
• Magenta Banner - Outside of End Cities
• Ominous/Illager Banner - Raid Captains or Pillager Outposts

To combine the banner with your shield, just place the shield and banner together!

Repairing Your Shield

There are two ways you can repair a shield! You can combine two damaged shields together and they will form one repaired shield. the second way is by using an anvil, it requires planks.

Shield Enchantments

There's currently only three enchantments you can place on a shield, and two of them are actually pretty good!

• Unbreaking III - You'll want this on pretty much every piece of armor, weapon, and your shield. It gives a chance that any time your item is used, it will not be reduced in durability. The higher the ranking you have of Unbreaking, the less likely your item is to take a durability hit.
• Mending I - Whenever your item has reduced durability, you will slightly restore it when collecting an Experience Orb.
• Curse of Vanishing I - This one is not so useful, it just makes it so the item that is enchanted will disappear upon death.