Overview
White wool is the base of the whole sixteen-colour wool set, and it is the only one that comes straight off a sheep — every other colour is either a dyed sheep or dyed wool. Sheared with shears a sheep drops 1 to 3 wool and regrows its coat by eating grass, which makes wool the earliest genuinely renewable resource most players set up, and three wool plus three planks make a bed, which is the single most important early crafting recipe in the game. Beyond that, wool has a mechanical property nothing else shares: it absorbs vibrations completely, so a sculk sensor or a warden cannot hear anything that happens on or behind a wool block. A wool path across an ancient city floor is the standard way to walk through the deep dark in silence, and wool blocks placed around a sculk sensor isolate it from unwanted triggers. Wool also blocks sound in note block builds, burns readily, and can be sheared back off a placed block only by breaking it. It is one of the very few blocks a piston can push that also has a real gameplay effect.
Beds, carpets and banners, dyeing into the other 15 colours, and — uniquely — absorbing vibrations so a sculk sensor or a warden cannot detect anything that happens on it.
In Minecraft 1.21.4, White Wool is a coloured block. A crafting table turns its ingredients into White Wool. Its hardness of 0.8 makes it a normal, unhurried block to mine.
You can break it by hand without losing the drop. It drops as the same block you mined. With a blast resistance of only 0.8 it will not survive an explosion.
Sixty-four fit in one inventory slot. The recipe calls for String. It is an ingredient in 4 recipes, among them Painting, White Banner, White Bed and 1 more.
About the white set
How to get it
Shear a sheep with shears for 1 to 3 wool; the sheep regrows its coat by eating grass, making it renewable. 4 string also crafts 1 wool, which is the fallback if you have spiders but no sheep.
Tips
- Lay a wool path through an ancient city: wool blocks every vibration, so no shrieker will ever hear you.
- Shear rather than kill: a sheared sheep regrows its wool by eating grass, and killing gives only 1 wool.
- Dye the sheep rather than the wool — a dyed sheep produces that colour every time you shear it.
- 4 string crafts 1 wool, which is useful if a mineshaft trip has left you with string and no sheep.
Properties
White Wool resists blasts at 0.8, which is not enough to survive anything explosive nearby. Light does not pass through it, and it emits none of its own. Stack size is 64 — the standard full stack. It renews, so a single world will never run out. Fire takes to it quickly — encouragement 30, burn 60 — which makes it a poor neighbour for lava or a lit campfire. The fastest tool for it is shears; any other kind of tool mines it no faster than a bare hand does, because the speed bonus only applies to the tool class the block is tagged for. As furnace fuel it burns for 5 seconds — half of what a single smelting operation needs.
- Transparent
- No
- Required tool
- Any
- Flammable
- Yes (30/60)
- Renewable
- Yes
- Fuel value
- 5 s
Crafting recipe
Crafting Table
Shapeless recipe
White Wool
Crafting Table
White Wool
Drops
Mined with any, White Wool drops itself.
Used to craft
White Wool is an ingredient in 4 recipes, producing Painting, White Banner, White Bed, and White Carpet.
Guides and tools that cover this
Frequently asked questions
How do you get White Wool in Minecraft?
White Wool is crafted from String.
What tool do you need to break White Wool?
No specific tool is required — White Wool can be broken by hand.
Is White Wool blast resistant?
White Wool has a blast resistance of 0.8, so an explosion nearby will destroy it.
How many White Wool fit in one stack?
White Wool stacks to 64, so a single double chest holds 3,456 of them.
Is White Wool renewable?
It is. White Wool can be made again in the same world, so there is no need to ration it.
The rest of the set
White Wool is one of 16. Every other member behaves the same way:
