Minecraft is primarily a game of survival, battling monsters to gather basic necessities and eventually tame at least a portion of the world to call home.
In this main part of the game, the player usually wears drab-colored armor, usually iron gray or leather brown, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Leather armor can actually be dyed!
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Why Dye?
Many players wonder, “What is the point of dying your armor? It’s primarily an aesthetic option for you to add some color to your wardrobe, however, the mechanic isn’t purely aesthetic. When you dye your leather armor, you have an amazing opportunity to organize.
Enchantments are frequently mutually exclusive, and not every enchantment is suitable for every situation. A helmet with Aqua Affinity enchantment and boots with Depth Strider enchantment are fairly useless in the Nether, but are invaluable in an Ocean Monument.
Rather than sitting these armors in a chest with other specialized leather armor and hovering over each piece to find the ones with the enchantments you need, you could dye the whole set the same color (blue for the example above perhaps) so you can easily find it when you need it. Moreover, those dyed sets of armor will look pretty snazzy on a stand or on your avatar.
What You Need
It is obvious that dying leather armor requires two components, leather armor and dye of your choice. Additionally, you will need a crafting grid (in Java Edition) or a cauldron (in Bedrock Edition). The crafting grid in your inventory can be used for this or you can use a crafting table.
Sourcing Leather Armor
Your Minecraft world contains a number of places where you can find leather armor. Almost all chests in generated structures (Desert Temples, Jungle Temples, Abandoned Mineshafts, etc.) can contain leather armor. You’re more likely to get leather armor if you combine leather from cows, llamas, horses, and rabbits.
Sourcing Dye
It depends on what color you want to achieve when choosing dye sources. There are 16 different colors in Minecraft, most of which can be obtained from flowers and other plants. Colors such as red, yellow, orange, light gray, pink, light blue, blue, and magenta can be acquired easily from flowers.
Bonemeal produces white, cocoa beans produce brown, ink sacs produce black (or wither roses if you have an abundance of them), cactus produces green, and sea pickles produce lime green. These and the remaining 16 colors can be made by combining the above colors logically (blue and green make teal, red and blue make purple, etc.).
How to Dye Leather Armor
Finally, your armor and dye are ready. Applying dye to leather armor is quite simple (at least for Java Edition). In your crafting grid, place the leather armor you’d like to dye and the dye color you’d like to use. That’s it! That’s some dyed leather armor you’ve got there!
By now, you’ve probably noticed that this method doesn’t work in Bedrock worlds. In Bedrock, dying armor is a little different. It is actually important that you add water to your cauldron. Apply your chosen dye color to the water in the cauldron by right-clicking the cauldron. Right-click the cauldron you added the dye to and hold the armor you want to dye in your hand. Having applied the dye color to the armor, it now looks like this.
The dye system in Minecraft goes beyond simply applying one of the 16 colors to your armor. You can dye leather armor even after it has been enchanted since organizing your enchanted armor is one of the best uses for this mechanic.
If for some reason you hate the color once it’s applied, you can actually remove it by holding the dyed armor in your hand and right-clicking on a cauldron filled with water. The water must be fresh, undyed in order to remove the dye from bedrock armor. The water level in the cauldron will be lowered by one level, and all the dye will be removed from the armor you are holding, restoring its original color.
It is also possible to dye leather horse armor, allowing you to ride in style!
Last but not least, you are not limited to just 16 dye colors. The dyes can be mixed to create unique colors for your armor. Place your already dyed leather armor in a crafting grid and add the dye you wish to mix in, and it will blend the old color with the new one! Using this method multiple times will make all your armor truly unique!
Bedrock Edition follows a slightly different process. Add all the dye colors to the water in the cauldron to create your color mix, then right-click on the cauldron holding your leather armor to apply them all at once!
You’re probably dying to dye your leather armor now that you know how to do it … Okay, that joke wasn’t great, but the leather dying system is awesome and you should definitely try it!