Bundle vs shulker box in Minecraft: How different are the two?

There are two items available in Minecraft's experimental versions for the sole purpose of allowing players to carry more items: shulker boxes and bundles. Since the problems they solve and the utility they offer are so similar, it's only fair to directly compare the two. Other than allowing players to store items, bundles and shulker boxes are actually remarkably different from one another.

Everything players need to know about exactly how bundles differ from shulker boxes can be found detailed below.

---

Just how different are Minecraft's bundles and shulker boxes?

Accessibility

Bundles require killing cows, while shulker boxes require besting dangerous shulker mobs (Image via Mojang)

The accessibility of Minecraft bundles and shulker boxes is one of the key differences between them.

Bundles are intended to be early game items and, as such, are much easier and cheaper to craft. Players will only need a single string and leather to make a bundle.

Shulker boxes are endgame items that are way more expensive. They require eight wood for a chest and also two shulker shells. These shells can only be obtained by killing Minecraft shulker mobs found within end cities.

---

Storage capacity

Shulker boxes can hold much more than bundles can (Image via Mojang)

Storage capacity is another area where bundles and shulker boxes are incredibly different. Bundles can contain at most 64 items. Shulker boxes, for comparison, are identical to single chests, other than the fact that they retain their items when broken. This means that they can contain up to 27 full stacks or individual items.

To really demonstrate just how huge of a difference this is, here's some math. Minecraft's game-changing ender chest has 27 inventory slots. If will with full capacity bundles, this equates to a maximum of 1728 items. Seems like a lot, right? Well, an ender chest filled with shulkers can contain 46656 total items. Quite a significant improvement, needless to say.

---

Customization

Being able to both rename and color-code shulker boxes is extremely useful (Image via Mojang)

The ability to customize shulker boxes is one of the things that makes them incredible for item storage.

Shulkers can have their color changed, using Minecraft's dyes, to make it easy to quickly see what kinds of items are inside of them. They can also be renamed in an anvil for further clarification.

Bundles, on the other hand, can only be renamed within an anvil.

---

Utility

Bundles are amazing for being able to store multiple different items in a single inventory slot (Image via Mojang)

While bundles might seem like strictly worse shulker boxes, they actually have a distinct advantage: they're better for storing random items. Since a single bundle is able to hold many different partial stacks, they're way better for collecting the random items that players will accumulate over time. Meanwhile, shulker boxes are better suited for large-scale, long-term item storage.

Bundles can also be placed within shulker boxes, making it much easier to tuck all of these random items away and out of sight rather than having them fill up entire Minecraft storage systems.