How to summon lightning in Minecraft

Luckily you can summon lightning with any method in every edition of Minecraft that is available to the public.

Platforms that Support Spawning Lightning

The command to summon lightning is “/summon lightning_bolt” on every edition of Minecraft. If you want to summon lightning in survival Minecraft you will need to get a trident.

(Through Commands)

1. Cheats enabled (World Setting)

If you are looking to summon lightning through commands, you just need to have cheats enabled in your world settings. This is on by default in a creative mode which invalidates any chance of obtaining achievements but allows you to summon as many lightning bolts as you want.

(In Survival Minecraft)

1. Trident
2. Channeling Enchantment (Enchanted Book or Enchantment Table)

If you want to summon lightning in survival Minecraft, you will need a trident enchanted with Channeling I. You can get Channeling through enchanted books or you can find it yourself in an enchantment table. This method is less reliable as it requires a thunderstorm to be occurring in your world for your trident to be able to summon lightning.

If you are playing survival Minecraft, the only way to summon lightning is to get a trident that has the Channeling enchantment. The first step would be to obtain a trident. Tridents will only drop from drowned enemies holding a trident. Drowned will commonly spawn in deep oceans or rivers. You can also artificially spawn drowned by keeping a zombie underwater for 15 seconds. These zombies that convert to a drowned will never be holding a trident.

You can increase your odds for a trident to drop from drowned enemies by using a sword with looting. Be careful approaching drowned enemies with tridents as they will use them against you. They will throw tridents at a decent range and getting away from a drowned with a trident underwater is no small task.

The next step is to get the Channeling enchantment onto your trident. Channeling can be found in the enchantment table, but you can also find it in minecart chests, dungeon chests, librarian villagers, and chests from non-village structures. In the Bedrock edition, you can also fish up enchanted books that can contain channeling.

Once you have a Channeling trident you just need to wait for a thunderstorm. While this is a rare event, you get to summon as many lightning bolts as you want during this event. Just hold your trident in your Hotbar, hold right-click, and release to see a bolt of lightning where your trident strikes.

If you do not have the Loyalty enchantment on your trident, you will need to pick up your trident again. With the Loyalty enchantment, it will snap back to your inventory after a few seconds. Congratulations, you have the Minecraft equivalent of Mjolnir during a thunderstorm.

To summon lightning through commands, you just need to type “/summon lightning_bolt”. This is the case for every version of Minecraft. If you want to summon a lightning bolt on a specific location, you can add coordinates after “lightning_bolt”. For example, “/summon lightning_bolt 320 70 -330”.

Obviously, you can change the coordinate however you see fit. If you want to go a little more extreme and summon lightning bolts on all entities, the command changes a bit. You will need to type “/execute @e ~ ~ ~ /summon lightning_bolt'' to strike all loaded entities with a lightning bolt. If you want to exclude yourself from this command be sure to change the command to “/execute @e[type=!player] ~ ~ ~ /summon lightning_bolt”. You can add any other mobs you do not want to hit with lightning by adding a comma after the player and adding another type of mob. Example below.

Q. How do you Summon Lightning with a Trident in Minecraft?

If you want to summon lightning with a trident you will first need to enchant your trident with Channeling. Next, you will have to wait for a thunderstorm. It does not seem like regular rainstorms work for the channeling enchantment. After it is thundering and your trident has the enchantment, any entity you hit with the trident will be struck with lightning.

Q. How do you Summon Lightning on all Entities in Minecraft?

You can see the full explanation above, but the command to summon lightning on all entities is as follows: “/execute @e ~ ~ ~ /summon lightning_bolt''. The syntax is important, and “execute” will tell the game to complete the following command. “@e” will target every entity. “~ ~ ~” are the coordinates, if you copy the tildas it will choose every coordinate with a loaded entity. Finally “/summon lightning_bolt” should be self-explanatory.

Congratulations, you now know how to summon lightning at your discretion in Minecraft. While survival Minecraft provides some limitations here and there with exactly how often you can summon lightning, you can still get the experience of controlling lightning bolts. If you have the capability to use commands in your world you can summon as many lightning bolts as you want. Use it as responsibly or irresponsibly as you want to. Minecraft is a sandbox game at the end of the day, and if you want to see every entity in the game struck by lightning bolts at once, you have the power to do so.