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The Minecraft Brush

An Archaeological Deep Dive

Minecraft is continually expanding its universe with new updates and innovative tools, each adding unique dimensions to gameplay. One of the more recent additions is the Minecraft brush, an item introduced with the archaeology mechanic in the ‘Trails & Tales’ update. The brush is a tool designed to use with suspicious sand and suspicious gravel, able to reveal the items hidden within those blocks. The brush provides players with a fresh way to interact with the Minecraft world. Let’s take a closer look at how to get it, how to use it and what loot you can get with the Minecraft brush.

Overview Minecraft Brush:

  • crafting: feather, copper ingot, stick
  • used with suspicious blocks & armadillos
  • unlocks unique loot pools
  • introduces archaeology to the world of Minecraft

What Is a Minecraft Brush?

The Minecraft brush is an item that allows players to excavate special blocks in certain biomes. The blocks are (at the time of writing) suspicious sand and suspicious gravel. These are variants of the regular sand and gravel blocks and can be identified when looking at their textures. While they look very similar, experienced players can spot some differently colored pixels on the surface: suspicious blocks seem to be more detailed and defined in their pixels.

Once you have found some suspicious blocks, the Minecraft brush is used to interact with them. By brushing these blocks, you carefully remove layers of sediment, uncovering ancient relics beneath. When engaging in brushing such a block, try to do so in one go. If you stop in the middle of your brushing session, the sand or gravel surrounding the artifact within will grow back after a short while.

Tip:Focus on searching trail ruins and cold ocean ruins for suspicious gravel and warm ocean ruins and desert wells and pyramids for suspicious sand. Not only do these locations have a high chance of spawning suspicious blocks in general, they also serve as excellent training grounds for spotting suspicious blocks.

How to Craft a Brush in Minecraft

As any experienced Minecraft player would, you surely asked ‘Can you craft a brush in Minecraft?’ when you first heard of this tool. And as it turns out, you not only can craft a brush in Minecraft, you actually have to. Unlike most of the other tools in the game, you can’t pick up brushes from chests or as mob loot.

The Minecraft Brush Recipe

Crafting a brush is easy if you follow the Mineraft brush recipe:

1x feather + 1x copper ingot + 1x stick = 1x brush

As you can see, crafting the brush is simple, requiring only 3 items. To find the necessary ingredients, you should look at these places:

  • feather: Feathers can be collected from chickens, which you should raise for food and other resources.
  • stick: Easily crafted from wood, sticks are abundant in the Minecraft world, even when you first start out.
  • copper ingot: Copper is the most difficult to find out of the 3 ingredients. While there is no guarantee for finding copper, you should focus your search on places in between y-levels 0 and 96, as this ore is most likely to spawn there. 

Again, keep in mind that there is no other way to find the brush in Minecraft. Since copper isn’t that easy to find, brushes are something you should strive for in the mid- to late-game. Going for it right from the start can hinder your development of more essential projects, such as training villagers or crafting redstone-based defenses.

How Do You Use a Brush in Minecraft?

Now that you have a brush and can identify suspicious blocks, it’s time to look into the actual use of the tool. To use the brush in Minecraft, you have to equip from your inventory. Then go to a suspicious sand or suspicious gravel block and begin to brush away the exterior by right-clicking. Keep in mind that you can’t simply break the block apart, as that would simply destroy its contents.

After 96 ticks (roughly 4.8 seconds in real life), the block turns into normal sand or gravel and you are left with the item that was hidden within. This procedure removes 1 durability point from the brush. In Minecraft Java Edition, brushes have 64 of these points, while they have 65 in Bedrock Edition. 

Using a Brush on an Armadillo 

Although suspicious sand and gravel are the main target for your Minecraft brush exploits, you can also use the brush on the recently added armadillo mob. By brushing an armadillo, they drop 1 armadillo scute. This might sound like a slow drop rate initially, but it is faster than waiting for the mob to drop scutes by itself, which takes between 5 and 9 minutes. Using the Minecraft brush on an armadillo removes 16 durability points from the tool, meaning that you can use a brush on an armadillo 4 times in Java and 5 times in Bedrock Edition.

Recommended Enchantments for the Minecraft Brush

Since the Minecraft brush is a tool like any other, there are some mechanics you can apply to get the maximum usage out of it. That includes using an anvil or a grindstone to repair it but also some enchantments that can help you gather items more efficiently by reducing the durability point consumption. These enchantments include ‘unbreaking’ as well as ‘mending’. While unbreaking adds a chance not to use durability points when the Minecraft brush is used, mending repairs the brush automatically when gaining experience. Finally, you can also put the ‘curse of vanishing’ on the brush, if you’re looking to challenge yourself.

Minecraft Brush Loot

The list of loot available from suspicious blocks is very long, so we will only show you some highlights. But rest assured, using the Minecraft brush has the potential to provide you with some exquisite items. Remember that some of these items cannot be found in every location, so searching different biomes can increase your chance of finding exactly what you need. Lastly, the pottery sherds found in sand and gravel have different motives from each other.

Suspicious Sand:

Suspicious Gravel:

Additionally, using the Minecraft brush this way offers something we cannot simply write down: the feeling of being an archeologist. The unique feeling of excitement and adventure is something you have to experience yourself in order to know it. What is the lore behind those relics you found? How did this civilization end? And why did they hide TNT in blocks? All of these questions are yours to answer.

Conclusion: Minecraft Brush

While you can do some really interesting stuff with the Minecraft brush, the mechanic is still fairly limited overall. Brushing away layers of sediment is definitely cool, there is no question about that – and yet it can get a bit stale after a while. But if the armadillo is anything to go by, we can expect more use cases for the Minecraft brush in the future. After all, Mojang isn’t done expanding the game, not by a long shot. And while you play on a Minecraft server from G-Portal, you can experience that development first-hand. Who knows what we can expect? New artifacts, other tools for digging deeper into Minecraft’s mysterious past or even new suspicious blocks are all on the table. But one thing will never change: Minecraft is fun and we are here to witness it all the way.

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