Minecraft has a rich diversity of combat, armor, and tool upgrades, ranging from wasting time to nearly game-breaking in power. After spending all that time grinding for levels to get enough experience to afford the higher-level enchantments, it can be hard to decide which ones to use. This guide covers the 10 best enchantments you can use in Minecraft from worst to best.
Best Minecraft Enchantments
Mending
Mending is easily one of the most potent enchantments in the game, and it’s essential to add to any of your tools, armor pieces, and weapons. It slowly repairs your items every time you gain experience at a rate of two durability-per-experience bubble. If you have more than one item with mending in your inventory, one receives the upgrade, not both.
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Mending is a “treasure enchantment.” All that means is you can’t obtain this enchantment via the enchanting table. Instead, you can find or buy it in many different ways — chest loot, fishing, Pillager raids, and trading with villagers. One thing to note about mending: if your bow already has the Infinity enchantment, you won’t be able to apply mending to it.
Unbreaking III
The highest level of Unbreaking is worth all the grinding for experience it requires. If you want your armor, weapons, and tools to last a long time, slap an Unbreaking enchantment on that sucker. This enchantment gives your items a chance to completely ignore durability reduction every time you use them, dependent on the level of the spell. If you want that diamond pickaxe to last through your strip-mining escapade, having Unbreaking III is one of the best deals you’ll get.
Fortune III
Exclusive to pickaxes, shovels, and regular axes, Fortune III is how you get the best bang for your buck when you’ve got that next big project ahead of you that needs a ton of coal.
Another high-tier enchantment, Fortune works on coal, diamond, emerald, Nether quartz, Redstone, glowstone, and lapis lazuli in terms of ore, and carrots, sea lanterns, melon slices, Nether wart, potatoes, beetroot seeds, wheat seeds, and seeds from the tall grass in terms of food and other plant-related items. It also increases the probability of gravel dropping flint, saplings, and apples from oak and dark oak leaves.
Fortune, however, is similar to Mending in that it’s incompatible with another enchantment. This time, it’s Silk Touch. This one makes sense, too — the game can’t expect you to be mining diamond ore with Silk Touch and expecting more diamonds from Fortune. A good idea is to have one pickaxe with Fortune and one with Silk Touch if you need them both.
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Protection IV
Protection IV is the highest-level enchantment within the tier system; it absorbs 16% of all damage you take — per item on your helmet, turtle shell, chest plate, leggings, and boots. The absorption caps out at 80%, so you won’t ever be completely invulnerable. Just close.
But, as great as all that is, protection has a lot of qualifiers. And those qualifiers are that you can’t have Blast Protection, Fire Protection, or Projectile Protection on your armor simultaneously. You can have specialized protection or regular protection. Choose wisely.
Sweeping Edge III
Good at combat? Love to kill things? Wish your sword could kill more things at once? Then look no further than Sweeping Edge III for all your mob-murdering desires.
The Sweeping Edge III enchantment is exclusive to the sword, and adds 75% damage every time you hit a sweep attack on something. It stacks with other damage-increasing enchantments like sharpness and smite, and bane of arthropods. It’s great for crowded fights in the Nether, taking out a bunch of monsters in your grinding zone, or culling an excessive number of cows on your farm.
Infinity
The Infinity enchantment is pretty self-explanatory. As long as you have at least one arrow in your inventory, the enchantment lets your bow fire an infinite amount of them. It excludes tipped and spectral arrows, but it’s not a bad deal.
As mentioned before, this enchantment is mutually exclusive with Mending, but it does have a different tradeoff: you can’t pick your arrows back up after you fire them. It would be far too easy to have infinite arrows if that wasn’t the case.
Silk Touch
Perfect for that snowy fortress made of ice you’ve meant to build, or if you’re just tired of smelting cobblestone down to regular stone again, Silk Touch is an excellent enchantment for builders. It lets you pick up blocks you’d never otherwise be able to retrieve — or at least not without some struggle — and allows for creativity. This enchantment goes to the pickaxe, which is a good choice, but don’t shy away from enchanting a shovel or a regular ax.
Of course, there are caveats outside of being mutually exclusive to Fortune. For example, most food blocks — like cake, beetroots, carrots, and the like — will be picked up like normal, and fire, monster spawners, monster egg blocks, and gravel still have a chance only to drop flint with a Silk Touch shovel.
Riptide III
Following the aquatic update, tridents are a handy weapon with an incredibly cool enchantment to go with them: Riptide III. It allows you to soar through the rain merrily like a flying fish, move like a dolphin through bodies of water, and jump out of the water like a humpback whale. If you collide with an enemy on your way, the trident deals damage as if you’d chucked it at them. Except it’s your whole body. Sweet.
Unfortunately, snow does not count as rain, so don’t try to jump off a snowy mountain with your Riptide trident unless you’ve got a good plan. It’s also mutually exclusive with the two other trident-exclusive enchantments, Channeling and Loyalty, but that’s a fair trade.
Looting III
Like Fortune, but for mobs, Looting III is a decent enough enchantment if you’re doing some serious grinding for materials. However, sometimes you want to get into the Nether, get your blaze rods, and get out.
Looting III, the highest tier looting enchantment exclusive to swords, practically guarantees you frequent everyday drops, bumps up the chance of rare drops to 5.5%, and bumps up the possibility of equipment drops by 11.5%. It’s not mutually exclusive with other enchantments, so feel free to go nuts with this one.
It’s helpful to note that the looting effect applies if you’re holding the enchanted sword in your hand, even if you didn’t kill the mob with the sword. So if you fire an arrow at a zombie and quickly switch to your enchanted sword before the arrow kills it? Looting applies to that.
Respiration III
This one’s also pretty self-explanatory as long as you know what the word “respiration” means. A helmet- and turtle shell-exclusive enchantment, Respiration III helps you breathe underwater.
At level three, the highest tier, Respiration adds 45 extra breathing time onto the base 15-second time limit. It also gives you a chance not to take any drowning damage if and when you do run out of air. This enchantment is perfect for exploring wrecked ships that aren’t quite deep enough to be worth a potion of water breathing or if your next project involves a lot of clay.
