If you love fighting at a distance in Minecraft, you’ll need to learn about Bow enchantments to maximize your effectiveness. A variety of different Bow enchantments elevate your fighting power, utility, and strategies. So in this article, we’ve ranked the best Bow enchantments in Minecraft for you.
The best Bow enchantments in Minecraft include Power Tier 5, Punch Tier 2, Flame, Unbreaking Tier 3, and Mending. Enchantments can be excellent for raising your character’s stats, adding additional damage types, and making unique builds.
Bows are perhaps the best weapon for ranged combat in Minecraft. They are elegant, fairly simple to craft, and have a variety of uses. Enchantments can be particularly important to enhance your character’s effectiveness with a bow. This is why we’ve suggested this list to help you dominate any situation you encounter.
7. Curse of Vanishing
The Bow Enchantment Curse of Vanishing is perhaps the only one that you wouldn’t want on your bow. Its effect is practically in the name, it’s a curse that destroys your bow if your character dies. Even if the bow is not equipped, so long as the bow has been enchanted with the curse, when you die it’ll be gone forever.
If it wasn’t obvious already, this is perhaps the worst bow enchantment that you can have, and we highly recommend against using it. You will do far better using the many other bow enchantments that we’ll mention later in this list.
| Tiers | Effects |
|---|---|
| 1 | Item disappears upon death. |
6. Unbreaking
An excellent Bow enchantment that I can recommend, however, is the Unbreaking enchantment. It’s not specifically tied to Bows but rather can be applied to any weapon that you’re using. It essentially increases the durability of your weapon. And it can be used a lot more than the weapon’s durability states.
Most Bows in Minecraft can only shoot an arrow 384 times. With the Unbreaking enchantment, it effectively raises the number of times a bow can be fired up to 768 times. And if you’ve raised the Unbreaking enchantment to Tier III then it can go all the way up to 1,536 times.
Anything that reduces resource consumption is always great. This also means you can use your favorite weapons a lot more, and keep utilizing powerful weapons and bows that you might craft. Other enchantments outclass Unbreaking but make your own decision about what you value and need.
| Tiers | Bow Durability |
|---|---|
| 1 | 768 |
| 2 | 1152 |
| 3 | 1,536 |
5. Flame
The next enchantment on our list is the Flame enchantment. It’s an excellent enchantment for your bow, and I would recommend that you enchant at least one of your bows with Flame. This enchantment is incredibly helpful for any of you who mainly use Bows and love to add some spark to your shots.
If you use the Flame enchantment, all of your arrow shots will become flaming arrows. When your flaming arrow will strike an enemy it will do the regular amount of damage of the arrow, but will additionally apply a Burn for 5 seconds on the enemy.
Additionally, your flaming arrows will only set fire to enemies, and will not set fire to any flammable objects nearby. You can use the Flame enchantment to kill Cows and Chickens. If you do this they will drop cooked versions of their meat.
The only issue? Well, this would be an S-tier enchantment if it did a little more damage through the additional burn effect. Additionally, any mobs killed by the flames themselves will not drop XP, which can be quite annoying for those of you trying to level up faster.
| Tiers | Effects |
|---|---|
| 1 | 5 damage over 5 seconds |
4. Punch
The fourth best bow enchantment is the Punch enchantment. The Punch enchantment in Minecraft causes your bow shots to knock back enemies. This is exceptionally powerful in the hands of a skilled player because you can create distance and keep safely attacking enemies with your bow through it.
With each Tier of the Punch enchantment, you will increase the distance that enemies are knocked back. This distance can go from just 3 blocks away up to a maximum of 6 blocks away from the point that the enemy makes contact with your shot.
The Punch enchantment is extremely good at managing dangerous enemies and keeping you safe. You really can’t go wrong with using this enchantment, because you will always find a way to use it. In the harder sections of Minecraft, this enchantment becomes invaluable.
| Tiers | Knockback |
|---|---|
| 1 | 3 Blocks |
| 2 | 6 Blocks |
3. Infinity
A must-have bow enchantment is the Infinity enchantment. It is incredibly powerful and its effect truly makes you appreciate the power of enchantments.
You see, with the Infinity enchantment, your bows will no longer consume an arrow when fired. All you need to do is keep a single arrow on your person. That’s all.
This means you can fire an endless stream of your most powerful arrows against an enemy, and not have to worry about ever running out of them or having to craft a ton more. You can attack, hunt and play at your leisure.
There are a few downsides to this enchantment of course. First, you can’t collect the arrows you shoot with the Infinity enchantment. Second, unfortunately, the enchantment doesn’t apply to any arrows that are Tipped or Spectral, it will only work on standard arrows.
| Tiers | Effects |
|---|---|
| 1 | Shoot unlimited arrows |
2. Mending
The enchantment, Mending, provides an immense amount of value. This enchantment is probably one of the most sought-after in Minecraft. With Mending you restore the durability of your items by exchanging them for your experience.
This is incredible because it means that your weapons, armor, and tools will never break, so long as you’re getting experience frequently. This means that so long as you keep killing mobs, your bows will never break.
One tip I will recommend, however, is that Mending is a “treasure” enchantment, this means you cannot get it from the enchanting table. But you can find Mending enchantments through Village trading instead.
| Tiers | Effect |
|---|---|
| 1 | Two durability restored from one experience point |
1. Power
In my opinion, the best bow enchantment in Minecraft is the Power enchantment. This enchantment is meant to vastly increase the amount of damage that your bow can output. At Power I the damage of Bows increases to 1 full heart when executing a quick shot and 4 1/2 hearts for a fully charged shot.
This damage only increases as the Tiers of Power are ascended, and can reach an absurd amount of damage potentials, especially because it’s possible to land a critical hit with a fully charged bow shot. A whopping 25 hearts of damage is possible through this method.
This is why we believe that the best enchantment you can add to your bow is the Power enchantment, and is what I’d recommend you seek out for your strongest bow as soon as possible.
| Tiers | Bow Damage (Fully Charged)/ Hearts |
|---|---|
| 1 | 9 |
| 2 | 11 |
| 3 | 12 |
| 4 | 14 |
| 5 | 15 |
There you have it folks, the best bow enchantments in Minecraft ranked from the worst to the absolute best. Let us know what you think about this, and stick with GameVoyagers for more guides on Minecraft.