You shouldn’t try to use brown as a main decorating color for most of your Minecraft bases. Getting Brown Dye requires a rare crafting ingredient. Unless you can farm it, Brown Dye will always be costly to craft.
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What You Need Make Brown Dye
The only ingredient that you need to make Brown Dye is Cocoa Beans. However, Cocoa Beans are very rare and can only usually be found in Jungle biomes. On any type of crafting grid, you can place Cocoa Beans by themselves to convert them into Brown Dye. Though, instead of using your Cocoa Beans right away, you could make a sustainable Cocoa Bean farm for much more chocolatey resources.
How to Get Cocoa Beans
Your best chance of getting Cocoa Beans is to first find a Jungle biome. The block that you need to mine to get Cocoa Beans is called Cocoa Pods—which only grow on Jungle Trees. You can spot Cocoa Pods on the sides of Jungle Trees at any height. These pods will vary in color and size depending on their maturity. Young Cocoa Pods will be green and small, moderately-grown ones will be a bit bigger and yellow, while fully-matured Cocoa Pods will be large and orange.
When you harvest a Cocoa Pod, make sure to only mine it after it is fully matured, as young and moderately-grown pods will not drop Cocoa Beans. With that said, the big orange pods will drop between 2 to 3 Cocoa Beans when mined. You can break Cocoa Pods with any tool, or even your bare hands, and it will always drop Cocoa Beans. The only exception is if you mine a Cocoa Pod with a tool that has the Silk Touch enchantment. Doing so will cause the Cocoa Pod to drop itself instead of Cocoa Beans.
You can also get Cocoa Beans from fishing and by bartering with Wandering Traders, albeit only in the Bedrock Edition of the game. While you’re fishing in a Jungle biome, you have a 0.8% chance of snagging Cocoa Beans with your Fishing Rod. In regards to Wandering Traders, some of them will sell you 3 Cocoa Beans for 1 Emerald, which is a great price.
What Brown Dye Can Be Used For
Like with all dyes in Minecraft, Brown Dye is only useful for decorative purposes. Due to this dye’s earthy color, it can be a great choice for more subtle and rugged bases.
Mobs and Blocks That Be Dyed Directly
By holding Brown Dye in your hand, you can change the color of a few different mobs and blocks without crafting.
- Using Brown Dye on Sheep will turn their wool brown
- Using Brown Dye on placed blocks of Wool, Beds, Glass blocks, Terracotta blocks, and Shulker Boxes will turn them brown
- You can turn the collars of tamed Cats and Wolves brown
What You Can Craft With Brown Dye
If you want to maximize your efficiency, you can craft items with Brown Dye. These same coloring techniques can be used for any kind of dye in Minecraft.
- You can combine Beds with Brown Dye to make Brown Beds
- You can combine Candles with Brown Dye to make Brown Candles
- When you’re making Concrete Powder, you can use Brown Dye to make Brown Concrete Powder
- When crafting different kinds of Fireworks, you can use Brown Dye to make them have brown particle effects
- You can combine Glass blocks with Brown Dye to make Brown Stained Glass blocks
- You can combine Glass Panes with Brown Dye to make Brown Stained Glass Panes
- Even though Terracotta is already brown, you can make it a different hue by combining it with Brown Dye
- It’s possible for you to find Sheep with natural Brown Wool, however, you can also combine Wool blocks with Brown Dye to get Brown Wool blocks
- You can combine Shulker Boxes with Brown Dye to make Brown Shulker Boxes
