The world of Minecraft is a vast and dangerous one. But those deep dark caves full of diamonds are also full of zombies, skeletons, and more. A set of armor can help you take hits and keep going. But for harder challenges, like Trial Chambers and Village Raids, just regular armor might not be enough.
That’s where enchanting comes in. With an enchanting table, you can infuse special effects and powers onto your armor that can make battles easier.
But with so many possible enchantments, which one is the best?
1. Mending Enchantment
Mending will not directly make you stronger, but instead automatically restore your item's durability by absorting experience points usually dropped by mobs. Aside from the convenience of not having to regularly spend diamonds to repair your best armor, this helps prevent the unavoidable problem of repairs getting more expensive over time.
Minecraft’s repair system tracks the number of times an item has been modified, making it more and more expensive until your armor becomes too unreasonable to fix the normal way. Mending sidesteps all of that, allowing you to put all your best enchantments and trims on a single armor without worrying about it ever going away.
2. Protection Enchantment
Simple, straightforward, and effective. The Protection enchantment reduces the damage you take – each level of protection mitigates incoming damage by four percent. That sounds small, but consider that you can have four levels on four sets of armor. Let’s do some math: a full set of Diamond Armor with Protection IV combines to provide damage reduction of over 80 percent!
The Protection enchantment will be the biggest factor in surviving long and difficult encounters, regardless of who or what you’re fighting. Otherwise lethal attacks become manageable nicks to your health, giving you more time to strike down (or run from) your attacker. With that damage reduction applying across the board (with the only exceptions being hunger, the void, a Warden’s sonic attack, and console commands), it’s among the most applicable and helpful enchantments available.
3. Thorns Enchantment
The Thorns enchantment essentially turns you into a walking berry bush. Whenever you are attacked by something else, whether that's melee or ranged, there’s a small chance that the attacker will also take anywhere between half a heart up to 2 and a half hearts worth of damage. The higher the enchantment level and the more armor pieces with Thorns you have equipped, the higher the average damage will be (up to 1.5 hearts on average) and the more often the effect will trigger (up to ~45%).
This is one of the more overlooked armor enchantments in Minecraft, Thorns does require you to take damage to deal damage. But in the context of longer fights, its contribution starts to add up quickly. Even at the odds of only dealing 1 heart of damage per enemy, a village raid could result in over 30 hearts of damage dealt over the entire event.
4. Unbreaking Enchantment
While not exactly exciting, Unbreaking is highly regarded for a reason: it provides good value. We’ve already explained the importance of keeping your armor durability up – the less you have to repair your armor, the better. Unbreaking introduces a random chance that your gear won’t lose durability when it otherwise would have, with these odds increasing with each level. On average, this can double, triple, and even quadruple the longevity of your enchanted armor piece.
This pairs especially well with Mending. Since Mending uses experience orbs to do repairs, the more fixing it has to do, the less experience you get yourself. Unbreaking helps offset that by keeping your armor fully repaired for longer and allowing more of those experience orbs to flow into you and not your armor.
5. Feather Falling Enchantment
Of all of the ways to die in Minecraft, few are as present and consistent as fall damage. Whether that’s a slip of the finger while building a tall structure, a hole in a bridge you didn’t see, or the classic mistake of digging straight down to your death, even the most experienced Minecraft veteran will eventually take fall damage.
There are a few ways to prevent this, though. Potions of Feather Fall and buckets of water are some examples, yet those either have time limits or require quick reflexes.
With the Feather Fall enchantment, you can reduce fall damage automatically. Usually it only takes 24 block tall heights for fall damage to become lethal. At a rate of 12 percent per level, boots with Feather Fall IV can help you survive heights as tall as 55 blocks!
6. Respiration Enchantment
As you probably know by now, doing anything underwater in Minecraft is always a challenge. You only have 15 seconds of air by default, which is little time to get anything meaningful done before having to swim back to the surface. And so, the treasures of the ocean go largely ignored. This all ends with Respiration – a helmet-only enchantment that increases underwater time by another 15 seconds for each level. A full Respiration III helmet means a full 60 seconds before air runs out.
With Respiration, you have time to brush away archeological sites, dig up coral, search through sunken ships, and move through an Ocean Monument with minimal interruption.
7. Depth Strider Enchantment
This boot enchantment is a fantastic pairing for the other existing aquatic armor enchantments in Minecraft.
Usually, you move about half as quickly in water compared to walking on land. Depth Strider helps offset that slowdown. Each level of Depth Strider closes the gap by about 33 percent, with Depth Strider III letting you swim just as fast as you can walk.
This applies to more than just open water, as you could also swim up waterfalls faster. So for those of you who like to make water elevators, or need to ride up a stray falls deep in a cave, this can save a ton of time.
8. Aqua Affinity Enchantment
Have you noticed how much longer it takes to mine anything while underwater? It takes five times as long, in fact. Aqua Affinity can be equipped on any helmet to negate that mining speed penalty, allowing you to mine at the same speed underwater as you would above the surface.
This is especially helpful for anyone who cannot let go of the underwater ores just in front of your eyes. So, whether you’re carving out large sections of ocean or gathering rare underwater blocks, this enchantment can save you quite a bit of time.
Tips on Getting the Most Out of Armor Enchantments
If you’re new to enchanting or otherwise modifying your armor, these bits of wisdom can ensure you’re making the most of the resources you have.
Combine Items With an Anvil
Using an anvil, you can combine two of the same enchanted items to create a single fully repaired item that carries over all enchantments.
Transfer to Armor via Enchanted Books
You can enchant books, then combine those books with an item to transfer the enchantment onto the item.
Combine Enchantments to Level Them Up
To get an enchantment of a higher level, combine two of the same enchantment type together.
Villagers Sell Enchanted Gear
Villagers will sell enchanted versions of their relevant tools (armorers will sell enchanted armor, librarians will sell enchanted books, etc).
Tinkers Construct
For the folks looking for a more transformative experience, Tinker’s Construct introduces a forging system, alongside a huge selection of new materials to make armor with. Many of these armors also include special bonus effects.
Elytra Slot
The Elytra is an incredibly fun item in Minecraft. But the fact that it takes up the chest armor slot means you have to sacrifice 25 percent of your protective power to use it. This mod gives the Elytra its own slot so that your chest armor can stay on.
Durability Tooltip
With durability being a critical aspect of keeping your enchanted armor from breaking, this simple UI mod tells you exactly how much more your armor (or any item with durability) can take.
Better Than Mending
Mending is handy, but it only repairs your gear if you actively gather experience orbs. This mod lets you use your existing experience pool to feed the Mending enchantment as much (or as little) as you want.
How to Install Minecraft Mods
You can install the above mods automatically using the CurseForge app or manually by placing the mod files within your game’s mods folder. Both methods allow you to easily add custom features and enhancements into your vanilla Minecraft experience.If you want to learn more, you can read our detailed guide on how to install Minecraft mods.
Common Issues and Quick Fixes
An Armor Piece Won’t Accept an Enchantment at the Anvil
There are a few reasons why you may not be able add a specific enchantment when combining items at an Anvil. Most problems stem from an incompatibility between the item or the enchantment. Check that none of the following circumstances apply to you:
- Aim to use the same item, since enchantments don’t transfer between different item types. Enchanted Books are an exception, imbuing whatever spell they contain onto your desired item.That particular enchantment might not be compatible with the item you want to enchant. Enchantments like Sharpness can appear on an Enchanted Book, but they won’t carry over onto something like armor.
- Some enchantments actually block other enchantments from being applied. This is usually because the two effects would conflict with each other, like how Depth Strider and Frost Walker can’t be on the same pair of boots. This problem is especially common with armor, since Protection and the Blast, Fire, and Projectile variations of Protection are all incompatible with each other.
- Double-check that you have enough experience to afford combining the two items. Enchanting is an expensive process and it’s easy to lose track of how much experience you have left.The Enchantment You Want Isn’t Showing Up
Minecraft uses an incredibly complex algorithm to determine what enchantments to offer for each item, referencing things like the item’s material and how many experience levels you spend on the enchantment.
Different enchantments also have different rarities, defined internally as “weight.” The higher the weight, the more likely it is to appear. For instance, Protection has a weight of 10, making it 10 times more likely to appear than Thorns, which has a weight of one.
Some of the rarer enchantments might not be possible with lower-level enchanting. Consider adding more bookcases to your enchanting table setup and opting for the higher level enchantments to increase the odds of getting the one you want.
Additionally, some enchantments are not available from an Enchanting Table. These are commonly called “treasure enchantments” and they can only be found as loot. Mending is the most sought-after example of a treasure enchantment, only being available from loot chests, fishing, or villager trading.
How To Remove Enchantments
There are two ways to take an enchantment off of an item.
- If you have two of the same item, you can combine them together on a crafting menu. This runs it through the repair mechanic and wipes away any enchantments on the item.
- The more cost-effective option is to use a Grindstone. This process doesn’t require a second item and will actually return some of the experience used in enchanting it initially.
Your Mending Armor Is Still Taking Damage
The Mending enchantment relies on experience orbs to make its needed repairs. In the normal course of battle, the experience orbs that mobs drop will be more than enough to offset any damage those mobs dealt to your armor. But that isn’t always the case.
Long-drawn battles against a singular enemy, like an End Dragon or a Warden, can result in you taking large amounts of damage without any experience orbs to make armor repairs along the way.
Armor can also take damage from non-combat sources, like lava or TNT. So all of the durability lost during a (hopefully accidental) lava bath won’t be fixed until you find more experience orbs, either from fighting mobs or through non-combat methods like mining or trading.