All About Armor Trims in Minecraft 1.20

Armor trims are a new feature in the Minecraft Trails & Tales update. They are a great way to spice up the aesthetics of your armor. Find out more by reading the article!

Armor trims are a new feature in the Minecraft 1.20 "Trails & Tales" update that allows you to finally customize the look of your suit of armor!

You can put trims on your armor by exploring your world and finding Smithing Templates in structures, and combining them along with your piece of armor and a material of your choice in a Smithing Table.

There are 16 different types of armor trims that you can customize your armor with, giving you a lot of options for expressing yourself! Their smithing templates are all found in different generated structures in your Minecraft worlds. For more information on where to find each type of armor trim, read out article on it here.

Every type of armor trim in Minecraft 1.20, applied to netherite armor with emerald as the trim material.

When applied to your armor in a Smithing Table, armor trims can also be made in 10 different colors via these different materials:

Amethyst Shard,
Copper Ingot,
Diamond,
Emerald,
Gold Ingot,
Iron Ingot,
Lapis Lazuli,
Nether Quartz,
Netherite Ingot,
Redstone Dust.

A grid showing the effects of different material armor trims on Diamond and Netherite armor

Smithing Templates are consumed upon use, however you can duplicate them by putting them in a crafting table, along with 7 diamonds and a block of its base material (e.g. Sentry armor trim templates use Cobblestone, and Tide armor trim templates use Prismarine).

The crafting recipe to duplicate the Smithing Template of Sentry Armor Trim.

This new feature is an excellent way for players to customize how they look in survival mode, as with armor trims you can now finally express yourself without sacrificing the protection of netherite armor!

All the armor trims are also data-driven, meaning using a combination of data packs and resource packs, servers and custom maps can add their own armor trim patterns and materials, in addition to all the vanilla ones. This could allow servers to add custom armor types without workarounds such as modifying the core shaders, which could cause incompatibilities with shader mods.

For more technical resource pack artists, this update also brings in an exciting new feature: color palettes. Armor trims use this new feature for both the items and worn models to automatically generate the textures for all 10 different colors. It uses a texture for the color palettes similar to how foliage uses a colormap texture in some biomes, allowing resource packs to easily change the palette of the different armor trims materials. This is a very exciting change for resource packs that like to adhere to a specific palette, as previous things such as potions and leather armor colors are hard-coded and can not be changed without installing mods.