Purple Banner is a Minecraft decoration block crafted from six purple wool placed across the top two rows of the crafting grid and one stick in the bottom-middle slot. One craft yields a single Purple Banner, and the base color can never be changed afterwards — only Bedrock Edition's bleach recipe can strip a finished banner back to plain white. Purple Banner breaks with any tool, though an axe works fastest, and drops as an item whenever the block behind a placed banner is moved or destroyed. No Purple Banner generates naturally in Minecraft: end cities carry magenta banners, woodland mansions hide gray, light gray, and black banners, and savanna villages hang brown banners, so every purple flag comes from the crafting table.

Purple Banner accepts up to six pattern layers in a loom, each colored with any of the 16 dyes, and the last-added layer washes off in a water-filled cauldron. A patterned Purple Banner crafted together with a blank banner of the same base color produces two identical flags. A Purple Banner combined with a shield prints its design onto the shield and is consumed. In Java Edition, using a map on a Purple Banner plants a purple map marker that vanishes when the banner breaks, unless the map is locked in a cartography table. Cartographer and shepherd villagers sell banners of any color for 3 emeralds, and a Purple Banner even smelts 1.5 items as furnace fuel.