Minecraft Trail Ruins: how to find Pottery Shards and Armor Trims

Minecraft Trail Ruins are a new feature in Minecraft 1.20 that offer a lot of Pottery Shards and Armor Trims

Contents

1. What are Minecraft Trail Ruins?
2. What are Pottery Shards?

This week saw Minecraft snapshot 23w12a add a bunch of new features in preparation for Minecraft 1.20, also known as the Trails & Tales update. One of the focuses of this update is a new archeology system that lets you dig up relics and even revive the long-dead Sniffer species.

With that comes new randomly generated structures to house these new discoveries. Known as Trail Ruins, these structures are where you’ll find several of the new Armor Trims, along with the previous Pottery Shards.

What are Minecraft Trail Ruins?

Trail Ruins are usually buried under the ground or underwater, with only the top poking out

Is a brand new type of ruin to go with the four already in the game – those being Desert Wells, Desert Temples, Cold Ocean Ruins, and Warm Ocean Ruins.

Trail Ruins spawn mostly (or entirely) underground or underwater in Jungle, Birch Forests, or any variation on Taiga biomes. You’ll need to dig down to fully uncover these ruins, as they’re quite large, seemingly resembling a long-buried section of an abandoned village.

There aren’t any chests in these ruins, but you will find clumps of either Suspcious Sand or Suspicious Gravel. These are the two items you need to be on the lookout for, as cleaning them with a brush has a chance to uncover Pottery Shards and Armor Trims.

We’ve got a full guide on Minecraft Armor Trims if you want to know the ins and outs of how they work.

What are Pottery Shards?

You can make all sorts of decorated pots with Pottery Shards

As you may have already guessed, you can use Pottery Shards in Minecraft to make pots. There are 20 different types of Pottery Shard, and you can use them to fully customize your pot. Here is every type of pottery shard currently in the game:

• Angler Pottery Shard
• Archer Pottery Shard
• Arms Up Pottery Shard
• Blade Pottery Shard
• Brewer Pottery Shard
• Burn Pottery Shard
• Danger Pottery Shard
• Explorer Pottery Shard
• Friend Pottery Shard
• Heart Pottery Shard
• Heartbreak Pottery Shard
• Howl Pottery Shard
• Mourner Pottery Shard
• Plenty Pottery Shard
• Prize Pottery Shard
• Sheaf Pottery Shard
• Skull Pottery Shard
• Snort Pottery Shard

You craft pots by putting four shards in a crafting table in a diamond shape, each side of the pot will have a different pattern based on what type of shard you used – using a brick in place of a shard will make that side blank.