This blog post will explain everything you need to know about the brush, including how to get it, how to use it for excavating suspicious blocks, how to use it to get armadillo scoots, enchantments for the brush, and how to repair it.
How to Get the Brush
The brush is a tool in Minecraft that is used for excavating suspicious blocks to get loot items and brushing armadillos. The crafting recipe is a feather, a stick, and a copper ingot in this pattern in the crafting table, which crafts a brush. The brush has a durability of 64.
How to Use the Brush to Excavate Suspicious Blocks
How the brush works is when you right-click or hold the use button, this will brush a block. While you are brushing, your movements will be slowed, similar to crouching. There are only two blocks that you can brush right now: suspicious sand and suspicious gravel. Both of them have similarities to sand and gravel. However, if either has a block below them removed, they will drop and be destroyed. If they are mined, they will be broken. Also, Silk Touch cannot be used on them; this will just destroy them.
You can only excavate them where they are found and probably should work from the top to the bottom so they won’t be destroyed by falling. This is different than usual where you break sand blocks from the bottom; you don’t want to do this with suspicious blocks.
Both suspicious blocks look similar to the original but they have a different texture, a lot more dots on the surface. The difference between the suspicious blocks and the normal blocks are very subtle if you aren’t paying attention. When you brush these blocks, an item will slowly emerge from the block and turn it into a normal block. When the item is excavated, this will use one durability of the brush.
The brush can be used on other blocks; there will be a brushing animation, however this won’t do anything to the block. Also, you can break blocks with the brush, but this is just like using your hand to break blocks.
From playing around with the brush, I would suggest that you brush the sand and gravel blocks to see if they are suspicious. You should be able to tell when there are cracks on the surface and an item begins to emerge. If the blocks are normal, just mine them by hand. Because telling the suspicious sand from the normal can be difficult, you will want to be careful and take your time. Using shovels or pickaxes might be too quick and break the suspicious blocks before you see them.
The suspicious sand and gravel have a bunch of spots that can be found, including the desert pyramids, wells, and the new trail ruin structure, and the ocean ruins. With both suspicious sand and gravel, there will be different loot tables depending on the location it is found.
The reason to find the suspicious blocks and excavate them with the brush is that you can gain a bunch of items like the sniffer eggs, pottery sherds, and armor trim smithing templates. There are 20 different types of pottery sherds found in suspicious blocks out of the 23 total pottery sherds. The pottery sherds can be crafted with bricks or other pottery sherds to create decorative pots. The decorative pots are a decorative block that can also have a stack of items stored inside and can output a redstone signal using a redstone comparator depending on the fullness of the decorated pot. It isn’t a full block but can be used for building, as you can craft different patterns from the pottery sherds on each side or place flower pots and flowers on top.
Besides pottery sherds, there can also be armor trim smithing templates found in the rare suspicious gravel in the trail ruin structure. This can be applied to armor in the smithing table along with a crystal or ingot to put that color onto a piece of armor. This will create a customizable decoration on the armor. There are four different armor trim smithing templates found in the trail ruins: the host, raiser, shaper, and wayfinder. There’s an 8.3% chance to get each of these armor trims. The rare suspicious gravel looks the same as the common suspicious gravel in the trail ruins, so there is no way to distinguish them from each other.
Another loot item found in the suspicious sand in the warm ocean ruins is the sniffer egg at 6.7%. This is the only way to get the sniffer egg in the game. The sniffer egg will hatch the sniffer mob that will smell the ground and dig up ancient seeds like the new torchflower seeds or the pitcher pod. Pitcher pods can grow into pitcher plants and torchflower seeds can grow into torchflowers that can be used to breed more sniffers.
How to Use the Brush to Get Armadillo Scoot
The brush can also be used to brush the armadillo mob to get armadillo scoot. Armadillos are a mob that is found in the savanna and badlands biomes. They are a passive, pinkish-red mob that is less than a block tall or wide. If you approach them, they will roll into a ball. If you brush them, they will drop one armadillo scoot.
Using an unenchanted brush will use 16 durability. You will get four uses in Java and five in Bedrock before it is depleted. You can brush the armadillo mob as many times as you want to keep getting armadillo scoot, however, it uses up a lot of durability on the brush and will break it quickly. The armadillo does drop one armadillo scoot every 5 to 10 minutes, but it is easier to brush them to get the scoot.
The crafting recipe for wolf armor is six armadillo scoots in this pattern in the crafting table. The wolf armor can be placed on a tamed wolf and provides protection for the wolf. The wolf armor can be dyed with any dye and removed using shears. This is the only use for the armadillo scoot at the moment.
Enchantments for the Brush
There are three enchantments for the brush.
The Curse of Vanishing is a curse enchantment. The text will be red to make it stand out from the other enchantments. Curse enchantments cannot be removed from items through the grindstone. The Curse of Vanishing will make an item disappear when you die when it is in your inventory. This won’t matter if you’re playing in hardcore or have keep inventory on.
The Unbreaking enchantment will reduce the possibility of durability being used when the brush excavates a block. The maximum level is three. At level three Unbreaking, there’s a 25% chance for the durability to be used; at level one, it is a 50% chance.
The other enchantment for the brush is the Mending enchantment. When mending is on the brush, it will restore the durability using experience. The Mending enchantment is a treasure enchantment; it can only be obtained through chest loot, fishing, or trading with a librarian villager. One XP will restore two durability. The brush needs to be in your hand or off-hand. Also, if you have multiple gear with mending, one will be chosen at random.
How to Repair the Brush
The brush does not have a lot of durability, with only 64. It has the same durability as a fishing rod or flint and steel. Having enchantments like Mending or Unbreaking lessens the durability used so you don’t have to keep crafting brushes.
The only way to repair the brush is by combining two damaged brushes in the crafting grid. This will add the durability into one brush and give a 5% bonus in durability. This will be capped at the maximum durability of the brush at 64.