Crafting
Click dyes below to put them in the grid.
Inventory
Undyed
#a06540
Leather Tunic dyed_color none
Put at least one dye in the grid to get a command.
Crafts
Find dyes for a colour
Every mix of up to 8 dyes, then up to two re-dyes, ranked by how close they land
Target colour
Takes a second or two. The recipes use the leather tunic from the table above.
The dye formula
Why mixing trends toward muted colours
For each craft the game collects the armor's current colour (if it has one) and every dye in the grid. It averages the red, green and blue channels, and separately averages each input's brightest channel. Then it scales the averaged colour so its brightest channel equals that second average. All of it uses integer division, which is why neighbouring mixes can land one or two points apart.
Averaging pulls colours toward grey, and the scaling only restores brightness, not
saturation. That's why vivid targets come out muted and near-black is out of reach: even
eight black dyes give #1d1d21. Re-dyeing helps because the
armor's colour counts as just one input, so each new craft nudges it instead of starting over.
The armor stores the result in the dyed_color component as a
single integer. The same component also works on leather horse armor and wolf armor.
More Minecraft tools
The rest of the set, for the parts this one doesn't touch
Frequently asked questions
The formula, reachable colours and the command
How does dyeing leather armor work in Minecraft? +
Put a leather armor piece in a crafting grid with 1 to 8 dyes. The game averages the red, green and blue of every dye plus the armor's current colour (if it's already dyed), then scales the result so its brightest channel matches the average brightness of the inputs. This page runs the same integer maths, so the hex it shows is the one the game writes.
Can I get any colour on leather armor? +
Not in survival. Mixing only reaches colours between the 16 dyes, and the scaling step stops you going very dark or very saturated. Pure #FF0000, for example, can't be crafted. Re-dyeing an already dyed piece helps you get closer, and the finder above tries up to three crafts. With commands, dyed_color takes any RGB value.
Does the order of dyes in the crafting grid matter? +
No. Within one craft the dyes are simply summed, so their position doesn't matter. The order of crafts does matter: re-dyeing counts the armor's current colour as one extra input alongside the new dyes.
What is the dyed_color number in the /give command? +
It's the RGB colour packed into one integer: red × 65536 + green × 256 + blue. #3A6EA5 becomes 3829413. Since 1.21.5 the component is just that number; older 1.20.5 to 1.21.4 commands wrapped it as {rgb:...}.
How do I remove dye from leather armor? +
Use it on a cauldron filled with water. Each wash takes one level of water and returns the armor to its undyed brown.
Last verified for Minecraft 26.3