Pottery sherds and decorated pots in Minecraft 1.20 update: All you need to know

Minecraft 1.20 will arrive on June 7, 2023, complete with new blocks and items to support the archeology gameplay. As part of the feature that sees players finding ancient treasures from the past, it's possible to collect pottery sherds (formerly known as pottery shards before recent snapshot/preview updates), which can be assembled into decorated pot blocks.

By brushing suspicious sand and suspicious gravel blocks, Minecraft players can find various pottery sherds with different patterns on their faces. These sherds come in many forms, depending on where they're found, and multiple sherds can be combined into the same decorated pot. This allows a decorated pot to have multiple patterns on its different sides.

For Minecraft fans who may not be aware of these new inclusions, it doesn't hurt to examine how they work in the 1.20 update.

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What to know about pottery sherds and decorated pots in Minecraft 1.20

Although there are plenty of other additions in Minecraft 1.20, thanks to the inclusion of archeology, pottery sherds and decorated pots should become a very substantial portion of the new feature.

As previously mentioned, pottery sherds are obtained by brushing suspicious sand/gravel blocks found in various generated structures within the game world. The sherds themselves can't be used for much, but they can be combined into decorated pots.

Additionally, if players don't have enough sherds to make a complete decorated pot, they can substitute sherds in the crafting recipe with clay bricks. However, the sides of the decorated pot crafted with bricks won't show patterns the way that those crafted with pottery sherds do.

The recipe for decorated pots possesses four different directional facings. Based on the sherd/clay placement that players use in the crafting table, they can create a decorated pot with patterns facing in a specific direction if they'd like.

Once a decorated pot is built in Minecraft, it can be broken and mined instantly with any tool. When broken this way, decorated pots will drop the sherds and bricks used to craft them.

However, if a player breaks a decorated pot with their hands, the pot itself will drop instead, allowing fans to retrieve it and place it again or transport it in their inventory. This also applies if players break the pot with a non-tool item in their hands or if they use a tool with the Silk Touch enchantment.

Similar to flower pots in Minecraft, decorated pots are used as decorative blocks that can hold various blocks like flowers within them. However, these decorated pots are different in the fact that the top of the pots doesn't have any form of in-game collision associated with them.

This means players can ostensibly place just about any block in the game atop a decorated pot without problems arising, and this includes the ability to stack multiple decorated pots on top of each other.

With 20 pottery sherd variants in Minecraft 1.20, there is certainly plenty of room to create unique decorated pots, which fits in nicely with the Trails & Tales update's theme of exploration and self-expression.

With just a few days left until the update's debut, players will undoubtedly have plenty of creative ways to use pottery sherds and decorated pots that even Mojang may not have considered.