5 Best Uses of Minecraft Shears

Shears are an important tool that allows you to achieve things you cannot otherwise. In our guide on making shears, we focused on the required resources and the crafting recipe of this tool. And here, we’ll be covering all the ways you can use shears in your Minecraft world.

Table of Contents

Shearing Mobs and Blocks

1. Sheep

The most obvious use of shears is, well, shearing animals. By right-clicking or using the secondary action button on a sheep with a shear, you will obtain its wool. You can do the same by killing them, but using shears allows you to get up to three wool.

Once the sheep eats more grass, you can shear it again. This mechanic is used in a wool farm, so you can obtain this block automatically.

2. Wolf Armor

Wolf armor is an epic item that provides a lot of protection to a tamed wolf by absorbing the upcoming damage. You can easily equip this item on your tamed wolf by right-clicking. However, the only way to remove it from your dog is by using shears. Select shears on your hotbar and right-click the wolf with wolf armor. The wolf armor will get dropped in the item form.

3. Mooshrooms

If you happen to come across one of the rarest Minecraft biomes, i.e. mushroom fields, you can also use shears on mooshrooms. Once you do that, you will receive five mushrooms or the corresponding color and the mooshroom will turn into a cow.

4. Snow Golems

Once you make a snow golem with two snow blocks and one carved pumpkin, the golem will appear with a pumpkin on its head. However, by using shears on it, you can remove the pumpkin head and the snow golem’s goofy face will be revealed. Also, you’ll get the carved pumpkin back.

5. Beehives & Bee Nests

If a beehive or bee nest is full of honey, displayed with honey dripping out of the block, you can use shears on it to collect three honeycombs. However, make sure you first place a campfire below the beehive so the bees don’t get mad at you.

After shearing, you’ll need to wait for some time for the honey to refill. It’s also possible to make a bee farm, which will automatically gather both honeycomb and honey for you.

6. Pumpkins

If you use shears on a pumpkin block, you’ll receive four pumpkin seeds and the pumpkin will turn into a craved version. You may use this block as a helmet in the head slot of your inventory to make golems, such as the snow golem we mentioned before, and one of the best light source blocks – jack o’lanterns.

Placing Shears in Dispensers

The reason why so many items can be obtained automatically is because dispensers can use shears. If there is something in front of the dispenser that can be sheared, like a sheep or beehive, and you activate the dispenser, it will trigger and shear the mob or block.

Furthermore, if there is nothing to shear in front of the dispenser and you trigger it, the shear will not lose durability.

Shearing the Tip of Cave Vines

In Minecraft Java edition, it’s possible to stop certain plants from growing. By using shears on the tip of cave vines, kelp, weeping vines, or twisting vines, you’ll prevent their further growth. This can allow you to choose exactly how long your decorative plants will be, instead of all of them reaching the same length.

Use Shears to Get Blocks in Minecraft

The only way of obtaining some blocks is by using shears. They might drop something else when you break them without shears, but this tool allows you to gather the block itself.

In addition, you can acquire four of those blocks without shears, but the shears give you a certain advantage while breaking them. Here are the blocks you can get using shears:

• Cobweb (breaking cobwebs with a fist drops nothing, with a sword drops string, and with the shear drops the cobweb block)
• Dead Bush
• Fern
• Short Grass
• Nether Sprouts (breaking Nether sprouts with a fist in Bedrock edition drops this block, so you don’t need shears)
• Leaves
• Tripwire (breaking tripwire that’s attached to tripwire hooks with shears does not trigger a redstone signal)
• Vines
• Wool (wool also drops if you mine it with a fist, but it’s faster to use shears)
• Sea Grass
• Glow Lichen
• Hanging Roots
• Twisting Vines (using shears will guarantee that this block is dropped)
• Weeping Vines (using shears will guarantee that this block is dropped)

Enchantments You Can Apply to Shears

Since shears are tools, you can apply specific Minecraft enchantments on 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. Although, it doesn’t make much of a difference.

And we’ve reached the end of our guide. Now you know what you can use the shear for, what blocks it can break, and what enchantments can be applied to it in Minecraft. All in all, shears can help you acquire certain blocks, as well as automate the gathering of some resources. With that, what do you use shears for most frequently? Let us know in the comments below!