Minecraft is a game about expression, but honestly, staring at a chest full of plain gray wool is depressing. You want color. You want that neon green sheep farm or the perfect shade of cyan for your futuristic base. Figuring out how to get every dye in minecraft isn't actually that hard once you realize the game splits them into two piles: stuff you find in the dirt and stuff you have to cook or craft in a menu.
The color palette in Minecraft consists of 16 distinct dyes. Some are effortless. You punch a poppy, you get red. Others, like brown or magenta, feel like a chemistry experiment gone wrong if you don't know the specific recipes. If you're playing on Bedrock or Java, the mechanics are mostly the same, though some flower generation rates might feel a bit wonky depending on your world seed.
The Primary Colors: Finding Dyes in the Wild
You can't talk about how to get every dye in minecraft without starting with the basics. These are the "Primary Dyes." You don't craft these from other colors; you extract them directly from the environment.
White Dye is arguably the most important one because it's the base for every pastel shade in the game. You've got two main ways to get it. First, Bonemeal. Just kill a skeleton, take the bone, and craft it. If you're a pacifist, you can find Lily of the Valley flowers in Forest biomes. They’re small, white, and look a bit like bells.
Black Dye used to be exclusively from Ink Sacs. You’d spend hours diving into oceans hacking at squids. Now, it's easier. If you find a Wither Rose (which happens when the Wither kills a mob), you can turn that into black dye. Most players still stick to the squids, though. Or Glow Squids, if you’re near a cave.
Blue Dye comes from Lapis Lazuli. You’re likely already mining this for enchantments. If you’re short on ore, look for Cornflowers in plains biomes. They are tall, skinny, and a very distinct shade of blue.
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Red Dye is everywhere. Poppies, rose bushes, tulips, even beetroot. If you can’t find red dye, you’re basically not looking at the ground. Beetroot is a bit of a waste since you have to grow it, so just find a Meadow biome and start clicking.
Yellow Dye is similar. Dandelions and Sunflowers. Sunflowers are better because they always face East, which helps with navigation, and they provide two dyes instead of one.
Green Dye is the weird one. You can't just craft it. You have to find a Cactus in the desert and smelt it in a furnace. No furnace, no green. Simple as that.
Brown Dye is basically just Cocoa Beans. You’ll find these hanging off trees in the Jungle. If you aren't near a Jungle, you're out of luck unless you find a Wandering Trader who is selling them for an exorbitant price.
The Crafting Table Headache: Secondary and Tertiary Colors
Once you have your basics, you start mixing. This is where people usually get confused about how to get every dye in minecraft because the recipes can be specific.
The Easy Mixes
Orange is just Red plus Yellow. Lime is Green plus White. Light Blue is Blue plus White. You just put them next to each other in your crafting grid. It doesn't matter where. Just toss them in.
The Purple Problem
Purple Dye is Red plus Blue. From there, you can make Magenta. To get Magenta, you mix Purple and Pink. Or, if you want to be efficient, mix Blue, Red, and Pink. Wait. There’s a shortcut. Alliums and Lilacs exist. If you find a flower forest, you can skip the crafting table and just pick the flowers. Lilacs are great because they are two blocks tall, meaning you can bone-meal them for infinite dye.
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Grays and Pinks
Light Gray Dye is a mess. You can make it by mixing Black and White, or Gray and White. But the easiest way? Azure Bluets, Oxeye Daisies, and White Tulips. If you’re trying to figure out how to get every dye in minecraft quickly, always check the flowers first.
Pink Dye is just Red and White. Or Peonies and Pink Tulips. Peonies are two-blocks high, so like the Lilacs and Sunflowers, you can farm them with bonemeal.
Advanced Dye Farming: The Pro Method
If you’re building a massive project—like a 1:1 scale of the Taj Mahal out of wool—you can’t just pick flowers. You need a system.
The Flower Forest Trick
Flower Forests are the holy grail. If you use bonemeal on a grass block in a Flower Forest, it will spawn the specific flowers assigned to that exact coordinate. By moving your bonemeal dispenser just one block over, you might switch from getting Red Tulips to getting Alliums. High-level players build "flower farms" using shifting floors and dispensers to harvest thousands of dyes per hour.
The Cactus Smelter
Since Green Dye requires smelting, you should set up a zero-tick or a standard cactus farm. Cactus grows on sand and breaks when it touches a solid block. Surround a cactus with fences, let the items fall into a hopper, and pipe them into a furnace.
Wither Rose Farming
For the absolute best Black Dye source, you need a Wither Rose farm. This involves trapping a Wither and having it kill hundreds of chickens or endermen. It’s dark. It’s effective. It beats chasing squids in a boat any day of the week.
Strange Facts About Minecraft Dyes
Did you know that in the early versions of the game, Lapis Lazuli was the dye? You didn't craft "Blue Dye" out of it; you just rubbed the rock on the sheep. Mojang changed this to unify the system, but the old-school vibe still lingers in some recipes.
Also, Wandering Traders. Everyone hates them because they lead llamas onto your lawn and spit on you. But if you’re stuck in a Tundra biome with no flowers for thousands of blocks, that trader might be your only source of Cactus or Cocoa Beans. Keep a few emeralds handy just in case he shows up with something rare.
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Another weird quirk: The Brown Dye. Cocoa beans can actually be grown on the side of Jungle Logs. You don't need a massive jungle to have a farm; you just need one log and one bean. Plant it, wait for it to turn orange/brown, and harvest.
How to Apply Your Colors
Once you've mastered how to get every dye in minecraft, you have to use them. Dyes aren't just for wool.
- Leather Armor: You can dye leather armor in a crafting table (Java) or a cauldron (Bedrock). Bedrock's cauldron dyeing is actually way more advanced because you can mix colors inside the water to get thousands of different shades.
- Glass and Terracotta: These are "hard" colors. You surround the dye with 8 blocks of glass or clay.
- Shulker Boxes: Essential for organization. Dyeing your boxes helps you remember which one has the wood and which one has the diamonds.
- Banners: This is the endgame of dyeing. Using a Loom, you can layer dyes to create patterns, logos, or even "paintings."
- Signs and Text: You can use dye on signs to change the text color. If you use a Glow Ink Sac afterward, the text will glow in the dark.
Getting Started Right Now
Don't try to get them all at once. Start with a skeleton farm for infinite White Dye. Once you have White Dye, you can lighten any other color you find.
- Locate a Plains or Meadow biome. This will give you the bulk of your flowers (Red, Yellow, Blue, White).
- Find a Desert. Snag two pieces of cactus. Start a cactus farm immediately.
- Head to the Jungle. Grab Cocoa Beans.
- Set up a small furnace array. You'll need this for the Green and Lime shades.
If you follow this order, you'll have a full double-chest of every color in the game within an hour or two of gameplay. Stop settling for white wool. Build something vibrant. Go find a Flower Forest, bring a stack of bonemeal, and see what happens when you start clicking. You'll have more dye than you know what to do with.