One of the most elusive items in the game, the heavy core is commonly sought-after yet rarely found. Without a heavy core, you can't craft a mace – a unique weapon capable of dishing out massive amounts of damage.
But its existence is a myth to most. That's because it's only found in rare underground structures and under specific conditions, with a less-than 10% chance of appearing.
Don't worry, though! In this guide, we'll tell you everything you need to know to find a heavy core in Minecraft, as well as some mods that can improve your experience.
Where to Find a Heavy Core
Currently, the one and only way to get a heavy core is if one spawns from an ominous vault. These loot-giving blocks can only be opened with an ominous trial key. With only a 7.5% chance of dropping, however, you'll have to open, on average, 14 ominous vaults before a heavy core can appear.
Even worse, ominous vaults can only be found in trial chambers. Problem is, the average chamber will have two to five ominous vaults hiding inside.
Ominous keys aren't normal item drops, either. It requires the Bad Omen effect to be active while you explore the trial chamber.
In short, you need two things before you can begin:
- The location of a trial chamber
- An ominous bottle
How to Find Trial Chambers
These large underground structures are tremendously hard to find naturally, despite their large size. Fortunately, there's one way to reliably locate one, costing only a bunch of paper and a compass.
- Find the nearest village.
- Find a cartographer villager or place down a cartography table job block and convert a villager into a cartographer.
- Trade them paper for emeralds until they reach Journeyman level.
- Trade the emeralds and a compass for a Trial Explorer map.
- Activate the map and go to the marked location.
- Dig down until you fall into the trial chamber.
The bad news is that a cartographer will only sell the same trial chamber map. Since you'll likely need to explore about six different trial chambers before a heavy core will drop, you're going to need more villages and more cartographers.
The good news is that the same cartographer has the answer. The first map they sell will most likely be a village map for a different biome. Purchasing one and activating it will point to a different village in the indicated biome.
Follow that map, find the new village, then repeat the steps listed above to find another trial chamber. If you still didn't get a heavy core, go back to the second village, buy another village map, and try again.
Opening Ominous Vaults with an Ominous Trial Key
Getting to the trial chamber is only half the battle. The other half is getting an ominous trial key and opening the vaults. Before we can explain that, we need to explain how trial spawners work.
On Trial Spawners
Throughout every trial chamber are trial spawners. They resemble regular spawners, visually, except for a hatch in the top. When you step too close to one, it will activate, spawning several hostile mobs that will attack you. Once every mob is defeated, a few items will pop out the top of the spawner as a reward and it will deactivate itself for one hour.
Getting Ominous Keys
Ominous trial keys don't drop from regular trial spawners, but ominous trial spawners. Any regular trial spawner will be upgraded to an ominous one if you have the Bad Omen status effect on you when you first approach it. They operate the same way, except that the mobs are even more difficult to fight and the rewards are better. Ominous trial spawners have a 30% chance to drop an ominous trial key.
Following the same metrics we mentioned above, you'll need about 47 keys. Don't worry about trying to collect them all at once, though. There will be enough spawners in each chamber to provide enough ominous keys for that location.
Once you have a key, simply activate it on an ominous vault and the loot will shoot out of the top.
Getting the Bad Omen Effect
The Bad Omen effect is only obtainable by drinking from an ominous bottle. The most common way to get an ominous bottle is by defeating the captain of an illager scouting party. They will be the one holding the flag.
Alternatively, the spawners and loot chests inside of trial chambers have a fairly decent chance of giving an ominous bottle. So, even if you don't have one initially, you're likely to get one once you find a trial chamber.
Minecraft Mods that Expand on Resource Gathering
There are countless different resources in Minecraft. Some of them, like the heavy core, can seem impossible to get through traditional means. Instead of using commands to just give yourself what you need, consider giving mods a try.
The Minecraft community has built numerous mods that shake up how you gather resources, often with interesting, new gameplay mechanics.
Mob Grinding Utils
The premiere mod for automating resource collection from mob, Mob Grinding Utils offers a small selection of unique blocks and items that do everything from increasing spawn rates, automatically killing mobs, and collecting their resources.
This mod works particularly well with trial chambers, due to their large number of trial spawners and higher value rewards.
ProjectE
Turn anything into literally anything with ProjectE. A spiritual success to the Equivalent Exchange mod, this mod gives every item an EMC value (short for Energy-Matter Covalence). Using transmutation, you can break down items for their EMC, then use it to create new items.
Turn stacks of cobblestone into a tidy pile of iron, or a single diamond into more cooked beef than you will ever need. This can be a great way to cut down on hoarding while offering an alternative to searching for hours for one single item.
Easy Core
Sometimes, all you need is a simple fix to a single problem. Easy Core adds a crafting recipe for Heavy Cores, letting you spend a diamond, iron, and obsidian to craft one.
Still costing a hefty sum of resources, this is a fair and balanced alternative to the chance-based method of hunting down ominous vaults.
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
This vault won't open even though I have a key
There are two kinds of vaults in trial chambers. Trial vaults have a single skull on each side and can be opened with a trial key. Ominous vaults have three skulls on each side and can only be opened with an ominous trial key.
Double-check that you have the right key for the right kind of vault. If it still won't work, it means you already opened that one and need to find a different one.
The cartographer villager doesn't have a map to a new village
Sometimes, the cartographer will offer a map to a structure like a jungle temple, instead. They might also offer a map that leads to a village you've already been to.
This can be solved by making another cartographer and leveling them up. The new one might offer a different map for a different location.
I want to remove the Bad Omen effect
The Bad Omen effect sometimes lasts for over an hour. You may not want it to remain active when going back to a village or revisiting a trial chamber. Removal is easy, though.
Bad Omen is considered a potion effect. Like any potion effect, it can be removed immediately by drinking a bucket of milk.