Leather armor dye mixing!

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GracefulBeauty80 messagesstarted Jul 11, 2026, 7:05 AM

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago(edited)

It's possible to complete goals like "Wear Brown Leather Boots" without brown dye.

Background: When you craft leather armor with 1-8 dyes, Minecraft mixes the dye colors (plus the armor's current color if it's already dyed) together using a specific formula. There are 16,777,216 theoretically possible colors using commands, and 5,713,438 of those colors can be made by combining dyes. For goals like "Wear Brown Leather Boots", draftout cannot distinguish between boots dyed to #835432 via brown dye and boots dyed to #835432 another way (for example, Yellow + Blue -> Red x3 + Black x2 + Green x2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2NXW_xNXoc, thanks @Torin06 for testing).

The goal of this thread is to find easy dye combinations for hard-to-acquire dyes such as lime, brown, green, and cyan, or prove that no combination exists.

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

here's a dye combo for brown that avoids brown/green/cyan/lime: Purple + Blue + Black x3 -> Yellow x2 + Red x2 + Black x3

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

i wrote some code that runs a BFS on the implicit graph where colors are vertices and dye combos are edges, but the graph is too big for a full exhaustive search

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago(edited)

i found some code that can apparently fully search the graph to count its vertices: https://github.com/coinvariant/mc-armor-colors/

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago(edited)

it looks a lot more optimized than my code. it doesn't try to find alternative routes for specific dye colors, but i imagine it could be modified to do that

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

so i haven't proven this mathematically, but i'm pretty sure the amount of e.g. red in the color after mixing is >= the least amount of red in any dye used in the recipe

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

and same for green and blue. which means any dye that has the lowest value out of all the dyes in a specific color channel is impossible to recreate using only other dyes

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago(edited)

so cyan, green, and black dye should be impossible to recreate

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago(edited)

brown is definitely possible, and in many different ways. lime might be possible but outlook is not good

sam3 months ago

This is incredible

SOOT3 months ago

Agreed

sam3 months ago(edited)

Going to modify the code tmrw and try to find stuff

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago(edited)

i'm probably done working on this myself but happy to see others pick it up

nsla3 months ago

wow this is fascinating

r0hkx3 months ago

yeah this is awesome

r0hkx3 months ago

i change my mind this forum channel is good

r0hkx3 months ago

i didn't realize that the only nbt data on dyed leather armor was the hex code, that's interesting

hset3 months ago

i ran the full calculations with unlimited amount of All dyes \ {brown, green, cyan, lime} and only brown is reachable

hset3 months ago

- step 1: [2x Red + 1x Orange + 1x Yellow + 1x Light Blue + 1x Magenta + 1x Gray + 1x Black] -> #AD7262
- step 2: [3x Orange + 2x Gray + 3x Black] -> #835432

hset3 months ago

for 2 steps this is the minimal amount of dyes it can be done with, ill try searching for sequences with more steps but less dyes used

sam3 months ago

mbe i did something wrong but i think:

Orange + Red → Yellow + Blue → Orange → Black

gets to brown?

hset3 months ago

its possible you're correct because as i said i found minimal sequence for 2 steps

sam3 months ago

Ok i have verified this solution in game, and i have perhaps searched all possibilities exhaustively. I'm checking to see if any of the other ones might be viable but as far as i can tell this is this the best

sam3 months ago

dyes needed to start:
Red ×2, Yellow ×2, Blue ×1, Black ×1

sam3 months ago

so 1 squid and 5 plains flowers ya gg

sam3 months ago

can even use the leftover ink sac after quill

hset3 months ago

my algo says its minimal too

hset3 months ago

so ig thats it

sam3 months ago

mbe one other one that could be worth highlighting is for when you don't have blue:

Yellow + Light Gray → Pink → Light Gray → Orange×2 → Black

sam3 months ago

pretty niche tho

sam3 months ago

I may have proved:

Blue, purple, red, orange, yellow, white, light blue, pink, green, cyan, lime, and black are unreachable without their matching dye

sam3 months ago

ig this is pretty realistic if you have bones and a river, but no plains

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

yeah you can get yellow and red by bone mealing grass

sam3 months ago

right so this could be like a desert temple option mbe

sam3 months ago

but i think 90% of the time it's just this

sam3 months ago

with Orange + Red → Yellow + Blue → Orange → Black

hset3 months ago

should this be posted in resources now or do you have any other ideas?

sam3 months ago

other niche options:

Red×2, Yellow×1, White×1, Black×4.
Orange + Gray → Red + Black → Black×2 → Orange + Gray

if you dink the allium you just need Red×3, Yellow×2, Black×2 LOL

hset3 months ago

do you mean that for each dye X from this list you proved that All dyes \ {X} wont reach X?

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

probably pretty soon. i was thinking it'd be nice to list every viable combo for brown dye, roughly ordered by how reasonable they are

sam3 months ago

ya, + like excluding using both dyes from their intended crafts yk

sam3 months ago

the only other two that you can do are Gray and Light Gray, but every recipe is definitely worse than their normal recipe

hset3 months ago

so fast, i've been running All Dyes \ {Green} to see if it can get to Green for an hour already and its still calculating

hset3 months ago

well probability wise i should already conclude Green isnt reachable

sam3 months ago

ya i used to write fast code for a living

and i'm running on rtx 5090 + ryzen 9800x3d lul

sam3 months ago

ok ya i 100% verified this is brown-only tech

sam3 months ago

the gray and light gray ones completely nonviable

hset3 months ago(edited)

what is rarer desert or jungle?

sam3 months ago

you do need black always

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

black seems very useful for dye mixing in general because it tends to lighten the colors after averaging them

hset3 months ago

i just today realized that this mixing mechanic can be used to complete full leather armor in different colors with only 2 types of dyes
no idea if its known or not but probably should be posted alongside this strat. is there anything else to mention about leather armor dye mixing?

hset3 months ago

brown dye with no brown dye is a good post on its own but might as well include everything else related in it

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

yeah this is where i first heard of this mechanic being used for draftout, i saw feinberg do it actually

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

i think it's not very well known despite that though

sam3 months ago

ok in my opinion, these are probably the 4 recipes that are ever viable

sam3 months ago

allium/lilac for third one

sam3 months ago

you can force another squid if you're short a dandelion

sam3 months ago

for the main blueless one which is actually pretty good!

sam3 months ago

Red×2, Yellow×2, White×1, Black×3

sam3 months ago

this concludes my search

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

nice

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

and for this, i'm pretty sure best you can do is 4 dyes of type A and 3 dyes of type B

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

1. A
2. B
3. A + B
4. A + A + B

hset3 months ago

A + B and A, B as separate crafts might give different colors, no?

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

A -> B should be equivalent to A + B because then the armor itself will take on the color A in the mixing formula

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

so it becomes A + B in the second craft

hset3 months ago

oh true

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

and for three types of dye ig:
1. A
2. B
3. C
4. A + B

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago(edited)

so you need either 4, 3 or 2, 2, 1 or 1, 1, 1, 1 of each dye

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

if your dyes can be combined (like red + yellow -> orange), you only need 3, 2 which becomes 2, 1, 2

hset3 months ago

this is getting so niche

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

1 bone and 2 ink sacs is enough for example

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

or 1 bone 1 rose bush :p

GracefulBeautyOP3 months ago

3 dandelions + 2 poppies is probably the most practical

sam2 months ago

I still can’t believe you can make brown with leaf litter and a squid

sam2 months ago

Minecraft is amazing

CompactFacelast month(edited)

.
Conclusions:
1 The only leather color which can be arrived at without the main colour itself is brown.
2 There are viable recipes for brown leather colour.
(check reply 1 )
3You can use the colour mixing properties of leather armour for the "wear full leather armour, all different colours" goal.
(check reply 2 )

CompactFacelast month(edited)

CompactFacelast month