How to Make Carpet in Minecraft in All 16 Colors

Place 2 wool of the same color side by side in any row of a crafting grid and you get 3 carpets of that color. It works in the 2x2 inventory grid too, so you don’t need a crafting table.

That’s a good deal: 2 blocks of wool become 3 floor tiles. The color of the carpet always matches the wool, so the real work is getting the right wool.

Getting wool in the color you want

The cheapest wool comes from sheep. Kill one and it drops 1 wool; use shears and it drops 1 to 3 and grows the wool back after eating grass. A small pen of sheep and a pair of shears will keep you in carpet forever.

For colors, you have two options:

• Dye the sheep. Use a dye on a sheep and every future shearing gives that color. Breeding two dyed sheep can give lambs in a mixed color. Our page on breeding sheep covers color mixing.
• Dye the wool. Craft white wool with any dye to recolor it.

Four strings also craft into 1 white wool, which helps if you have a spider farm but no sheep.

Re-dyeing carpet

You no longer have to go back to wool to change a carpet’s color. In Java 1.20 and later, put any carpet and one dye in the grid to recolor it, one carpet per dye. Bedrock also accepts carpet plus a dye. If you’re dyeing lots of carpet, it’s usually cheaper to dye the wool first, since one dye then covers 1.5 carpets’ worth instead of 1.

Where carpet earns its place

Floors are the obvious use, but carpet does more than that:

• Fence jumping. Put a carpet on top of a fence post and you can jump over it, while animals in the pen still can’t. It’s a neat way to get in and out without a gate.
• No mob spawns. Mobs can’t spawn on carpet, so a carpeted floor in a dark room stays safe.
• Silent floors. Walking on carpet creates no vibration for sculk sensors or shriekers. Laying it down is a common trick for exploring the Deep Dark or for building next to a sculk redstone circuit.
• Llama decoration. A carpet in a llama’s carpet slot gives it a patterned blanket. It’s purely cosmetic, but it makes a caravan easier to tell apart; see riding a llama.
• Fuel, barely. In Java a carpet smelts about a third of an item. Burn it only if you have nothing else.

Moss carpet is a separate item made from moss blocks, not wool. It looks like a green rug, but you can’t dye it, and the vibration-dampening trick only works with wool carpet.

For more blocks to build with, see the guides hub.