How to Use Shulker Boxes in Minecraft

Guide Java Bedrock

Quick answer: A shulker box is a portable chest: it keeps all 27 slots of items inside when you break it. Craft one with 2 shulker shells + 1 chest, place it, fill it, mine it with a pickaxe and carry your whole inventory anywhere.

What you need

2 shulker shells (end city shulkers)
1 chest (8 planks)
Pickaxe for fast mining
Dye (optional, for color coding)

Step by step

Get shulker shells from shulkers in end cities (bring Looting III for more drops).
Craft: chest in the middle, one shulker shell above and one below.
Place the box and fill its 27 slots, the same space as a single chest.
Break it with any tool (pickaxe is fastest): the box drops as an item with everything still inside.
Carry dozens of filled boxes in your inventory: that is thousands of item slots in your pocket.
Dye boxes any color by crafting them with a dye, and store a filled box in your ender chest for a portable storage network.
Note: you cannot put a shulker box inside another shulker box.

Java vs Bedrock

Shulker boxes behave the same in Java and Bedrock: contents survive breaking, pistons and explosions. Creative instant-mining also drops the filled box.

Versions: Shulker boxes exist since 1.11 (Exploration Update). Before end cities are reachable, use donkeys or llamas with chests as portable storage.

Frequently asked questions

Do shulker boxes keep items when broken?

Yes, that is their whole point. Mining a shulker box drops the box as an item with all 27 slots of contents stored inside it, and placing it again restores access to everything.

Can you put a shulker box inside a shulker box?

No. Shulker boxes cannot contain other shulker boxes, which is the only nesting limit. But you can put filled shulker boxes inside an ender chest for effectively infinite portable storage.

How many items fit in a shulker box?

27 stacks: up to 1,728 of most blocks (27 slots x 64). A full inventory of filled shulker boxes holds over 60,000 items.