Minecraft 1.21 update is adding a new way to get trident

One of the major features revealed for Minecraft's 1.21 update is the new structure in trial chambers. These large, dangerous, spawner-filled structures offer great loot to those brave enough to best them. Some of this loot includes the new breeze rods needed to make wind charges and the new mace weapon, as well as golden apples, emeralds, and diamonds.

However, one of the most interesting pieces of loot available to players isn't a new item, but a repeatable and consistent way to get a rare older one. The new vault blocks found within Minecraft's trial chambers, as of the latest snapshots, have a chance to drop tridents.

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Minecraft's new way of getting tridents

This change makes trial chambers and even better addition to the game (Image via Mojang)

Since this new way of obtaining tridents is exclusive to trial chambers, knowing how to find these structures is vital. Thankfully, Mojang has made finding them much easier by adding in a Minecraft cartographer profession trade for a map to one, in the same way they offer trades for maps to ocean monuments and woodland mansions.

Once in a trial chamber, players will need to defeat the several waves of mobs that each trial spawner spits out to get the rewards. These have a chance to contain a vault key. Trial chambers contain several vaults that players can loot once each using these keys, and part of the loot table for Minecraft's vault block has a very slim chance at a trident.

Since the drop is by no means guaranteed and the vaults can only be ransacked once, players might need maps to several different trial chambers; this will encourage exploration.

Make sure to not enter a trial chamber with the Bad Omen Minecraft status effect as doing so will apply the Trial Omen instead. This is a new status effect that causes the trial chamber to convert to an ominous event. These are more difficult trial chamber variants with better rewards, but the trident is replaced on the loot table and thus cannot be obtained this way.

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The old way of getting tridents in Minecraft

Drowned are thankfully no longer the only way to get tridents (Image via Mojang)

Before this wonderful new addition, there was only a single way to get tridents: the drowned. Whenever the game spawns a drowned, there is a 6.25% or 15% chance for them to be holding a trident, depending whether the version is Java or Bedrock, respectively.

The version differences continue into drop rates as well. On Java, each trident-holding drowned has an 8.5% chance to drop a trident, increasing by 1% for each level of looting up to a maximum chance of 11.5%. On Bedrock, the base drop rate for tridents is 25%, increasing by 4% with each level of looting, till it reaches a maximum of 37% at looting III.

This left players totally at the mercy of RNG. And since zombies converted to the drowned can't get tridents, Minecraft XP farms using zombie spawners are unable to be used as trident farms.