Introduction

The most recent Minecraft snapshot has added armor trims, decorations to your armor applied via trim templates that you find in structures. I love trims and the concept behind them. Amazing armor personalization, more incentive to explore, and an actual reason for the smithing table to be a unique workstation!

The steel trim. The template is crafted with amethyst, deepslate, and iron.

However, trim templates can be really hard to find. To get one, you need to go to its specified structure. But the structures that have templates are often hard to find, and the chances of actually getting one are way too small.

For example, let’s say you want the dune trim, which is found in desert pyramids. The nearest desert can easily be several thousand blocks away, so that’s already trekking thousands of blocks and hoping you go in the direction of a desert. And if you find a pyramid, there’s about a 50% chance you get no templates. So you might have to search through a couple of pyramids to get just any trims. If you want enough templates to trim a full armor set, that’s even more searching for deserts and pyramids.

This problem of accessibility applies to about every structure that has trim templates. Strongholds, ancient cities, bastions, etc. are all hard to find and/or very lacking in template rates.

New Trims: Steel & Shard

The shard trim. The template is crafted with amethyst, obsidian, and Nether quartz.

There are a bunch of ways you can tackle the issues mentioned above—tweaking loot rates, making templates infinitely usable, etc.—but I want to propose something else: adding a few craftable trims.

The idea is based on banner patterns. You have the ones that are harder to get—snout, globe, and creeper charge—but you also have much more common ones like the flower charge and all of the default banner patterns you can access with just dye. Obviously, trims are meant to be a bit rarer and more trophy-like; but just like banner patterns, some should be more easily attainable.

I’d accomplish this with a few trims that you can craft with materials that aren’t too hard to get your hands on. These craftable templates are made with 7 amethyst shards, the template material, and some other item.

I’ve made some concepts for the idea: steel and shard. The former can be crafted really easily, just needing amethyst, deepslate, and iron. Shard is slightly more mid-game, requiring obsidian and some Nether quartz.

The recipes for the steel trim template and shard trim template.

I’d have more than these two, but they should illustrate the point: a few armor decoration options that don’t require searching for jungle temples and spending tons of diamonds to use.

Conclusion

<insert some neat or clever conclusion here telling people to comment what they liked and disliked about the idea>

Hope you found this idea interesting!