Top 3 enchantments for shields in Minecraft

A shield enchanted with Unbreaking III (Image via Minecraft)
A shield enchanted with Unbreaking III (Image via Minecraft)

Enchanting is one of the most fun aspects of Minecraft. The purpose of enchanting is to make a player's weapons, armor, gear, and books stronger and more effective. From increasing the durability and speed of a weapon to making an armor set fire-resistant, enchantments can help in all sorts of situations.

The shield is quite an interesting item when it comes to enchanting in Minecraft. This is because there are only three enchantments that can be applied to it in survival mode.

Other enchantments can be applied in creative mode, or with mods, but vanilla Minecraft only allows three enchantments to be applied on a shield. These three enchantments are Unbreaking, Mending, and Curse of Vanishing.

This article will rank these enchantments as per their usefulness as far as a shield is concerned.


Minecraft: Every enchantment for the shield, ranked

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3) Curse of Vanishing

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Curse of Vanishing an enchantment due to which an item disappears or despawns as soon as the player dies. This, however, only happens if the item is in the player’s inventory or Hotbar at the time of death. If stored away in a chest, shulker box, or encoder chest, the item does not despawn on death.

Regarding shields, this enchantment can be a source of annoyance as shields are almost always on the player’s person, and dying once means the shield will disappear. Shields are important pieces of gear, and losing one in an emergency can turn the tide against players.


2) Unbreaking

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Unbreaking is one of the most useful enchantments in the game. The only non-treasure enchantment for the shield, unbreaking can be leveled up to Unbreaking III for the shield, just like it can be leveled up for other gear pieces like armor, weapons, and tools.

Unbreaking technically increases the durability of an item, with its actual ability being to introduce a chance of no durability reduction every time the shield is used.


1) Mending

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Mending is one of the rarest and best enchantments in Minecraft. This enchantment is quite similar to the Unbreaking enchantment, as it also deals with the durability of an item. However, this enchantment effectively allows an item to have infinite durability.

In the context of a shield, the enchantment will work as follows: When the player uses their shield to block incoming damage, like an arrow or sword attack, the shield will absorb the damage and lose durability.

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However, any experience points a player collects will then refill the durability meter for the shield instead of going into the player’s XP bar. Using this enchantment, players can bring their shield’s durability back up to maximum.

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