While most of a player’s protection from enemies comes from regular armor in Minecraft, you can also protect yourself with a shield. A shield can stop arrows from hitting and block melee attacks, making it a powerful and underrated addition to your gear set. To find out how to make a shield in Minecraft, check out the guide below.
Making a Shield in Minecraft
A shield only requires two resources to craft, but the way those resources are structured at a crafting table is slightly strange. The full crafting recipe for a shield is as follows:
- At a crafting table, place an Iron Ingot in the top middle box
- Next, place six planks around the Iron Ingot. Two to the side of it on the top row, three across the middle row, and one in the bottom middle box.
The planks and Iron Ingots are among the easiest items to acquire in Minecraft. Planks are gathered by placing regular wood logs in a crafting table and stripping them while Iron Ingots are acquired by smelting iron ore in a furnace. Iron ore can be mined wherever there is stone present and all it takes is a stone pickaxe. Once you have your resources, go to a crafting table to craft yourself a shield. Then, from your inventory, right-click on the shield to equip it.
If you want to add some flair to your shield, you can take it and a colored banner to a crafting table to change the color of the shield. The colored banner is made by using six colored wool and a single stick. With your colored banner, follow the recipe in the screenshot below to recolor your shield.
And that’s everything there is to know about crafting shields in Minecraft.