Ominuous Banners (also known as Illager Banners, on the Bedrock edition) are a reward that you get in Minecraft when you defeat Pillagers. It has limited uses, but it’s a unique kind of reward that you can use as decoration and show with pride. Let’s see how to get it, craft it and use it.
How to get it
Your best bet if you want to get a Ominous Banner is to go to a Pillager Outpost.
Once there you can find Ominous Banners hanging from the building.
And you can also find Raid leaders (with an Ominous Banner on their shoulders) watching over the area.
If you kill Raid leaders, they will drop the Ominous Banner.
Pillager Outposts spawn close to Villages, so if you are in a Village you can take a look around. Pillagers Outposts are quite tall buildings, so it won’t be difficult to spot them from far away.
Once you’ll enter the Outpost, all the Pillagers will start attacking you with their deadly Crossbows and Axes. So be sure to go there ready to fight.
Be aware that killing a Raid leader will cause you to get the Bad Omen. It is a status effect that will trigger a Raid as soon as you enter a Village: Pillagers will begin invading the Village and attacking Villagers.
It’s not a big deal though, you can easily get rid of the Bad Omen effect by either drinking Milk or dying… well, maybe don’t go for the second option it if you play on Hardcorde mode. To get Milk you will need to right-click on a Cow while holding on your hand a Bucket.
By the way, did you know that you can also tame Pillagers? You can check the following video on the topic.
How to craft a Ominous Banner
The Ominous Banner is the only banner type that you can’t craft in Minecraft. So technically you can’t craft it.
But you can still craft a fake Ominous Banner, that will look exactly like the real one. We will start by crafting a regular White Banner.
To craft a White Banner you will need a Sticks and 6 blocks of Wool (related topic: All the White blocks in Minecraft) and place them in a Crafting Table as follows:
Then you will need to start “painting” the Banner with the help of a Loom, a block that lets you specifically decorate Banners. You will need a lot of Dye: 2 Black Dye, 1 Gray Dye, 1 Cyan Dye and 3 Light Gray Dye. To find out how to gather all these different colors of Dye and how to craft a Loom, go down below to the last section of this article.
Once you gathered all the Dyes, a White Banner and a Loom, you will need to put the following patterns (in the exact same order) on the Banner:
You probably noticed that in the last screenshot the Banner doesn’t have blue eyes. That’s because in the Java version you can only put up to 6 patterns on a Banner. Since these screenshot were taken while playing the Java version, it was necessary to skip the Cyan pattern to complete the Banner.
If you are playing on Bedrock edition, you can put all the 7 patterns on a Banner.
If you are playing on the Java version you can either skip the Cyan pattern or the last pattern, which is the black border. OR you can go to the next section of the article.
In the following screenshot you can see how these two options (one without the cyan pattern, one without the black border) look next to the real Ominous Banner.
How to get it – commands
First of all, keep in mind that on the Java version you can’t get the Ominous Banner even in Creative mode. Also, if you use commands you will still be able to get only the “fake” version. So, if you want to get a fake Ominous Banner through cheats, you have to open the commands and type:
/give @p white_banner{BlockEntityTag:{Patterns:[{Pattern:”mr”,Color:9},{Pattern:”bs”,Color:8},{Pattern:”cs”,Color:7},{Pattern:”bo”,Color:8},{Pattern:”ms”,Color:15},{Pattern:”hh”,Color:8},{Pattern:”mc”,Color:8},{Pattern:”bo”,Color:15}]}} 1
Usage
An Ominous or Illager Banner is just a reward and it has limited use. The only thing that you can do with it, other than just place it as it is, is to place it on a Shield. Note that you can’t make custom Shields on the Bedrock edition.
To craft a Shield you will need one Iron Ingot and 6 Wooden Planks. Then follow this crafting recipe:
Then you will just need to put both the Shield and the Banner in a Crafting Table.
How to get the different colors of Dye and craft a Loom
To get Black Dye you will need Ink Sacks, that you get as loot when you kill Squids.
To get Gray Dye you need to put together a Black Dye and a White Dye (that you obtain from Bone Meal) in the Crafting Table:
If you put another White Dye in, you can craft Light Gray Dye:
To get Cyan Dye you will need both Blue and Green Dye. You can get Blue Dye from Lapis Lazuli, a mineral that you can mine deep down underground.
To obtain Green Dye you need to smelt a Cactus, that you can find in Desert biomes.
To craft a Loom you will need 2 Wooden Planks and 2 Strings, which you can get as loot by killing Spiders:
