Minecraft is Enchanting

For those who’ve been playing Minecraft long enough to have gotten the best kinds of materials (redstone, diamonds, obsidian, etc.) the next step in your journey lay in enchanting. Enchanting is essentially an intermediary step between finding the good materials and heading to the Nether and while it’s not strictly necessary, it’s very helpful.

How to Start

The first thing you’ll need for enchanting is an enchanting table. This is made using four obsidian blocks, two diamonds, and one book (made of one leather and three paper). Once you have your table, you can get started right away by placing it and right clicking it to open the enchanting window. To get started place the item you wish to enchant in the item slot on the left hand side of the window. The right side will then display the available enchantments. There should be three available each with a number by them going from the smallest number at the top to the largest number at the bottom. This number is the number of levels worth of experience you’ll have to pay in order to get a random enchantment. Don’t worry though, experience is much easier to get in 1.5 and you should find you have plenty just from doing your ordinary routine. Enchantments can cost anywhere from one to thirty levels worth of experience. The more expensive enchantments are well worth it as they give you the higher level IV and V enchantments which are considerably better than the lower level ones.

Upgrading Your Table

You may notice that initially there aren’t many high level options available to you from just the enchanting table. This is because there’s actually an additional aspect built into the game to boost what you can get out of the table. In order to increase the level of enchantments available to you, you’ll have to surround your enchanting table with bookshelves. These will feed into your enchanting table (a process represented by text flying from the shelves to the enchanting stand) and open up higher level enchantments. The best way to get the book shelves close enough is to make three 2x3 walls made of bookshelves with one of the walls being short 2 bookshelves (good place for a chest to store enchantment books/materials). You can frame this structure with anything to help save resources. The idea is that you need to get 16 bookshelves within one square of the enchanting table with nothing between them and the table but air to get the best enchantments available.

Enchantments

There are a number of different enchantments available in three different categories, tools, weapons, and armor.

Tools – Tools have four different kinds of enchantments, efficiency (faster use), silk touch (harvest actual material [diamond ore instead of diamonds]), unbreaking (increases durability), and fortune (increases the drop rate of items from blocks [extra diamonds])

Weapons – Melee and Ranged weapons each have their own enchantments sets. Melee weapons can be enchanted with Sharpness (extra damage), Smite (extra damage vs. zombies, zombie pigmen, withers, skeletons, and wither skeletons), Ban of Arthropods (extra damage vs. spiders, cave spiders, and silverfish), Knockback (increased knockback), fire aspect (lights the target on fire), looting (increased drops), and unbreaking (increased durability). Ranged weapons can be enchanted with unbreaking (increased durability), power (extra damage), punch (increased knockback), flame (sets arrows on fire which sets target on fire), and infinity (consumes no arrows)

Armor – Armor can be enchanted with protection (reduced damage from all sources), fire protection (reduced damage from fire, extinguishes fire faster), blast protection (reduced damage from explosions), projectile protection (reduced damage from projectiles) feather falling (reduced falling damage), respiration (reduces rate of air loss underwater, increases time between damage while suffocating), Aqua Affinity (increases underwater mining rate), thorns (chance of doing damage to mobs attacking the wearer), and unbreaking (increased durability).

Conclusion

Enchanting is a cool feature available to players of Minecraft and one well worth looking into once you’ve got the resources for it. If you’re looking for a way to get some extra advantages or just a fun new project, definitely include enchanting in your N3rd C0rn3r.