Top 5 enchantments for swords in Minecraft 1.18 update

Swords are Minecraft’s most iconic weapon, with the diamond sword being one of the game’s most widely seen merchandise items. They are also quite valuable in-game as a quick-fire means of defense against the many hostile mobs found across Minecraft’s dimensions.

Combined with enchanting, a system that makes items exponentially more helpful, swords can go from useful to absolutely game-changing, dealing extra damage, getting better drops, and setting everything on fire, just for some examples.

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Minecraft 1.18 the best 5 sword enchantments

5) Mending

Mending functions by repairing lost duration on held items, armor worn, or items in the player’s offhand. The repair rate is equal to two durability for every experience in an experience orb. If multiple mending items are available, one is chosen at random for each experience orb collected. There is no priority for any location or item type.

Mending is by far the best enchantment in the game. When combined with other enchantments, it effectively means that any item a player has that is fully enchanted is of infinite use, so long as the player takes the effort to repair it when durability gets low. This means that a player needs to fully enchant only one sword for the entire game.

However, on its own, the enchantment is not as good as some of the other options available for swords.

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4) Fire Aspect

A cow set on fire by the fire aspect enchantment (Image via Minecraft)

Fire aspect has two levels. Both levels add four seconds of burning to the target. The first level of this enchantment deals three damage, or 1.5 hearts of damage, over a four-second period. The second level of fire aspect deals seven damage, or 3.5 hearts of fire damage.

Fire aspect can also be stacked with one of the damage enhancing enchantments, such as smite, sharpness, or bane of arthropods. This makes the fire aspect even better, as it can stack its bonus damage with other enchantments.

Fire aspect also causes any mob that would normally drop raw meat to drop the cooked version of the meat. For example, cows killed by a fire aspect sword or that die to fire damage will drop steak instead of raw beef.

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3) Looting

Nine slime balls dropped from 3 tiny slimes (Image via Minecraft)

Looting has multifaceted effects, all of which are incredible. The first effect is that the maximum number of items for the most common drops increases by one per level. It also makes it much more likely for rare drops to drop by making a second roll if the original attempt fails. The success of the second attempt is equal to level / (level + 1).

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2) Smite

A smite five enchanted sword dispatches zombies (Image via Minecraft)

Smite is the best of damage enhancing enchantments, as well as the highest damage bonus enchantment in the game. However, the extra damage applies only to undead mobs. Thankfully, the list of undead mobs is quite long, and includes things like the Wither, making the enchantment still quite useful, even with the extra restrictions. The full list of applicable mobs includes:

• Skeletons
• Zombies
• Zombie villagers
• Withers
• Wither skeletons
• Zombified piglins
• Skeleton horses
• Zombie horses
• Strays
• Husks
• Phantoms
• Drowned
• Zoglins

The extra damage is equal to 2.5 for each level, or an additional 1.25 hearts per level. This totals out to 12.5 extra damage at smite five.

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1) Sharpness

Sharpness is a huge enchantment for swords. Unlike other damage enhancing enchantments, sharpness applies to every mob in the game, not a specific subsection of the game’s mobs. This bonus damage follows different formulas for different versions of the game.

On the Java Edition of the game, this bonus damage is equal to 0.5 * level + 0.5. This means that at sharpness five, the amount of extra damage for Java Edition players is equal to three, or 1.5 extra hearts.

On the Bedrock Edition of the game, the damage bonus is significantly higher. The enchantment adds 1.25 extra damage per level. At sharpness five, Bedrock Players see a massive damage increase of 6.25, or 3.125 hearts, of extra damage.

Note: The article reflects the writer's own views.