Ominous Banner in Minecraft: Here’s What It Does & How to Get It

Every Item and tool in Minecraft serves a given purpose, and most of them have their various special abilities, while others are meant mostly for landmark or decorative functions. A Banner, for example, mostly serves as a decorative item, but there is a special banner called “The Ominous Banner,” which serves a higher purpose. Unlike its counterparts, Ominous Banner has a scary effect and an even scarier origin, so let’s see what it does and how to get one.

Editor’s Note: This guide has been updated in October 2023, and reflects the most current state of the game.

Does Ominous Banner give a Bad Omen effect to the player?

Despite all the rumors circulating online, having an Ominous Banner in your inventory, picking it up, or displaying it near your home or village won’t give you a Bad Omen effect and neither will it attract more illagers to your location.

The Ominous Banner is purely cosmetic in nature. The only unique thing about this banner is the fact that it is by far the most intricate, naturally-spawning banner in the game, and this is what makes him so appealing to players who don’t want to go through the hardships of creating elaborate patterns.

The bad Omen status effect shows up when you kill a raid captain and can otherwise be removed by drinking milk and dying, but it’s not tied to the banner directly.

Is It possible to craft an Ominous Banner? How do you get it?

It’s not possible to craft an Ominous Banner because it uses eight patterns instead of 6 patterns allowed by the game. The most straightforward way to get Ominous Banner is to loot it off the raid captain or find it in pillager outposts.

If you happen upon a raid captain, chances are that he will drop Ominous Banner, and the easiest way to run into a raid captain is to wander around Pillager Outposts. Pillager outposts usually spawn near villages, although those types of buildings are significantly rarer than villages.

You can come across Pillager Outposts in plains, desserts, savannas, taigas, snowy plains, and even some biomes where villages usually do not spawn, like groves, snowy slopes, and frozen peaks.

How to create a fake Ominous Banner?

Even though an Ominous Banner cannot be crafted, you can create a fake one on a loom by using a white banner, cyan dye, white dye, light gray dye, gray dye, and black dye. And here is how it’s done.

And here’s what it looks like in the game:

You can additionally replace the blue eyes with a black border, but remember, you can’t even recreate illager banner in Minecraft due to the six-pattern limit imposed by loom. In Bedrock Edition, however, it’s possible to create a seven-pattern banner.

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