- To make shears in Minecraft, you will need two iron ingots and can use the inventory's crafting grid.
- Place one ingot in the bottom left corner of the 2x2 grid and the other one in the upper right corner.
- Players can get shears from shepherd villagers or by looting a chest in the shepherd's house in a village.
One of the most useful tools in Minecraft that you will need frequently is shears. They are necessary for getting some blocks like beehives and items like wool from sheep. They can also help automate a bunch of actions if placed in dispensers. Shears don’t have much durability, but you can easily make lots of them due to their cheap crafting recipe. So, in this guide, let’s see how you can make shears in Minecraft right now.
Editor’s Note: updated the shears guide on August 5, 2025, to improve readability
Items You Need to Make Shears
To make shears, you only need two iron ingots. You may find them inside loot chests of various in-game structures, or you can make them yourself by smelting raw iron or iron ore in a furnace in Minecraft. This crafting recipe does not require a crafting table, as your 2 x 2 crafting grid is more than enough.
How to Make Shears in Minecraft
When you get the required iron ingots, follow the steps below to craft shears.
- First, open your inventory by pressing the “E” key.
- Place one of the iron ingots in the bottom left corner of the grid.
- Next, place the second iron ingot diagonally from the first one in the upper right corner.
- As soon as you do that, the shears item will appear in the result slot on the right.
- Now, you can simply move the Shears to your inventory.
Alternatively, in this crafting recipe, you can place the first ingot in the upper left corner and the second one in the bottom right corner. What matters here is that they are on a diagonal from each other.
Where Can You Get Shears in Minecraft
You can obtain shears in a few more ways inside your world. One of them is through trading with villagers in Minecraft. Novice-level shepherds have a 40% chance to sell shears for 2 emeralds each on the Java edition. In the Bedrock edition, shepherds always sell shears.
The second way to get shears is to loot chests in the shepherd villagers’ house inside villages. You will have about a 12% chance of finding shears in them.
Best Minecraft Shear Enchantments
Since shears are tools, you can apply specific Minecraft enchantments to them. The supported ones are unbreaking, mending, efficiency, and curse of vanishing. Keep in mind that you cannot enchant shears in the enchanting table, and you will need to use enchanted books instead.
- Unbreaking enchantment allows the tool to sometimes avoid using durability. Shears use up one durability per use by default, but with unbreaking III, they will use up one durability once in four uses on average.
- Mending enchantment allows you to repair your shears’ durability with XP.
- Efficiency enchantment lets the tool break blocks faster. It may seem redundant on a shear, since most blocks shears break are insta-minable, but wool is not. With efficiency V on shears, you can break these colorful blocks instantly.
- Curse of Vanishing makes the shears completely disappear if you die with them. Lastly, it’s also possible to put silk touch on shears in the Bedrock edition. However, it doesn’t make much of a difference.
As you can see, crafting shears is very easy, but don’t let that make you think they’re not useful. We have covered all the uses of shears in Minecraft in a dedicated article, which will make it clear why you need them. With that said, go and make shears right away!
The shears crafting recipe is not shapeless, which means you need to place the two iron ingots in one of the two exact configurations to make them.
No, there is only one type of shear in Minecraft, and they are made of iron.
