Red Banner is a tall decorative flag crafted from six red wool and one stick: the wool fills the top two rows of the crafting grid, and the stick sits in the center of the bottom row. The recipe yields exactly one Red Banner, and the red base color locks at crafting time — a banner's base color can never be changed afterward. Red Banner stands on the ground in sixteen directions or hangs flat on a wall, gently swaying as if touched by a breeze. Banners have no collision at all: players and mobs walk straight through a placed Red Banner, and pistons cannot push the flag anywhere. Hardness 1 and blast resistance 1 make Red Banner easy to destroy with any tool, an axe works fastest, and a moved or destroyed support block drops the banner as an item automatically.

A loom turns Red Banner into a customizable emblem: up to six pattern layers stack on one banner, every pattern requires one dye, and a banner pattern item is never consumed by the loom. A water cauldron washes off only the topmost layer, so a wrong pattern costs little to fix. Crafting one patterned Red Banner together with a blank red banner produces two identical banners, and an unpatterned shield accepts the same pattern while consuming the banner. In Java Edition, using a placed Red Banner while holding a map marks the spot on that map, and using the same banner a second time removes the marker. Shepherd and cartographer villagers sell banners for 3 emeralds in Java Edition, and one Red Banner even smelts 1.5 items as furnace fuel. Minecraft added banners in Java Edition 1.8 and Bedrock Edition 1.2.0, and Red Banner is one of sixteen craftable colors.