Armor Trims: Every Template and Where to Find It

Armor trims let you decorate armour with patterns in a material of your choice. They are purely cosmetic — no stat changes, no durability effect — which makes them the game's best pure customisation system, and a good reason to explore structures you might otherwise skip.

How trimming works

You need three things at a smithing table:

1. 1.The armour piece you want to decorate.
2. 2.A trim template — the pattern, found in a specific structure.
3. 3.A material that decides the colour.

The template is consumed. The material is consumed. The armour keeps every enchantment and all its durability. You can re-trim a piece later with a different pattern or material, replacing the old one.

Every template and its structure

• Coast — Shipwrecks.
• Dune — Desert pyramids.
• Eye — Strongholds. Every library chest holds one.
• Rib — Nether fortresses.
• Sentry — Pillager outposts.
• Snout — Bastion remnants.
• Spire — End cities.
• Tide — Ocean monuments, but not from a chest: each elder guardian has a 1-in-5 chance to drop it.
• Vex — Woodland mansions.
• Ward — Ancient cities.
• Silence — Ancient cities. The rarest in the game, at about one chest in 80 — expect a long search.
• Wild — Jungle temples.
• Host — Trail ruins.
• Raiser — Trail ruins.
• Shaper — Trail ruins.
• Wayfinder — Trail ruins.
• Bolt — Trial chamber vaults.
• Flow — Ominous vaults in trial chambers.

Four of the eighteen come from trail ruins, which are excavated with a brush rather than looted from chests. If you are missing several patterns at once, trail ruins are the most efficient place to go.

Several of these structures already have guides on the site: our woodland mansion guide covers the Vex template's home, the deep dark and Warden guide covers surviving ancient cities for Ward and Silence, how to get an Elytra takes you to the End cities that hold Spire, and trial chambers explained covers the vaults behind Bolt and Flow.

Duplicating a template

You do not have to find every template twice. At a crafting table you can copy one:

• Top middle — the template you already own. You get it back along with the copy.
• Centre — one duplication material, usually a block from the template's home structure: mossy cobblestone for Wild, cobbled deepslate for Ward and Silence, terracotta for the four trail ruins patterns, or a breeze rod for Flow.
• The other seven slots — seven diamonds, one in each.

Seven diamonds is steep early on but trivial once you have a working diamond supply, and it means one lucky find covers a full armour set. The smithing templates guide lists the duplication material for every template.

Materials and the look they give

Eleven items work as trim materials, and each one decides the colour of the pattern:

• Iron — pale silver-grey. Understated, reads well on dark armour.
• Copper — warm orange-brown.
• Gold — bright yellow. The most visible on netherite.
• Lapis Lazuli — deep blue.
• Emerald — vivid green.
• Diamond — pale cyan. Very clean on iron or netherite.
• Netherite — dark brown-grey. Subtle, good for a muted look.
• Redstone — deep red.
• Amethyst — soft purple.
• Quartz — creamy off-white. High contrast on dark armour.
• Resin Brick — bright orange.

Contrast is what makes a set look deliberate. Quartz or gold on netherite is striking; netherite trim on netherite armour is very subtle, which some players want and others find disappointing after spending the diamonds.

There is one special interaction worth knowing: trimming iron, gold, diamond, netherite or copper armour with its own material swaps in a darker shade of that colour, so the pattern does not vanish into the armour. In 26.3 this rule moved out of the trim material data and into each armour's resource-pack file, so a resource pack can now change it; in the default game it looks the same as before.

Planning a set

Because a trim is consumed per piece, a full four-piece set needs four templates of the same pattern and four units of material. This is the main reason duplication matters — find one Silence template in an ancient city, then duplicate it three times for 21 diamonds rather than surviving three more Warden encounters.

Our armor trim gallery shows every pattern rendered in every material, so you can decide what you want before spending templates and diamonds on the wrong combination. It is considerably cheaper than experimenting in-game.

Is it worth the trouble?

If you play for progression, trims are optional and you can ignore them entirely. If you play for the long haul — building a base, running farms, showing off on a server — they are the clearest way to make your gear yours. And because collecting them takes you to shipwrecks, bastions, ancient cities, trial chambers and trail ruins, the hunt doubles as a tour of the structures with the best loot in the game.