If you want to maximize your potential in Minecraft, you need to know all about enchantments. This is especially true for combat, where you need to have numerous enchantments at your fingertips to survive. One such set of enchantments are sword enchantments. So in this article, we’ve ranked the best Sword enchantments in Minecraft for you.
The best sword enchantments in Minecraft include Sharpness Tier 5, Looting Tier 3, Unbreaking Tier 3, and Sweeping Edge Tier 3. Enchantments can be excellent for raising your character’s stats, having upgrades to work toward, and making unique builds.
Swords are probably the best weapon for combat in Minecraft. They have an iconic design, easy to make, and are incredibly powerful. By using enchants, you can raise the stats of your favorite swords, and with the ones we suggest in this list, you’ll dominate any Creeper that even looks at you the wrong way.
10. Curse of Vanishing
Perhaps the worst sword enchantment you can get is Curse of Vanishing. Unlike other enchantments that provide benefits to your character or equipment, this enchantment provides drawbacks. You see, the Curse of Vanishing causes your sword to disappear when you die.
While this might not be much of a bother for you hardcore world players out there, but for you regular Minecraft players, losing the sword you worked hard to craft can be extremely demotivating.
Diamond and netherite swords, in particular, can be excruciating to lose. This is why Curse of Vanishing is our worst Sword enchantment.
| Tiers | Effects |
|---|---|
| 1 | Item disappears upon death. |
9. Bane of Arthropods
The next sword enchantment on our list is the Bane of Arthropods enchantment. Similar to the Curse of Vanishing this enchantment has been ranked so low because it is perhaps one of the worst non-detrimental enchantments. However, unlike the Curse of Vanishing, it isn’t directly negative to your character.
Bane of Arthropods does exactly what its name suggests, it deals more damage to arthropod enemies. This enemy type includes spiders, cave spiders, silverfish, bees, and endermites. While in theory, this sounds fantastic, in reality, this is incredibly bad for your overall build.
The problem is that none of these enemies are particularly difficult to fight. These enemies have low HP and don’t deal any significant amount of damage.
Which means you can easily dispatch them. To make matters worse, this enchantment locks your sword out of obtaining better damage-related enchantments. The likes of which we’ll discuss later in this article.
| Tiers | Damage (Netherite Sword) |
|---|---|
| 1 | 10.5 |
| 2 | 13 |
| 3 | 15.5 |
| 4 | 18 |
| 5 | 20.5 |
8. Smite
Smite is significantly better than Bane of Arthropods because it doesn’t just work on a specific type of enemy, but several different enemies. When applied to your sword Smite deals a lot more damage to specific enemies.
Smite adds a wonderful additional effect to each of your strikes. This doesn’t add any meaningful effect or DPS, but it certainly makes each strike feel a lot more impactful and enjoyable to execute. It’s also important to understand that the types of enemies affected by Smite are far more plentiful in Minecraft.
Smite is highly effective against undead enemies, these include zombies, creepers, skeletons, and even the infamous Wither. Smite is far better than Bane of Arthropods and Curse of Vanishing simply because it makes encounters with the daunting Wither far easier and more manageable.
| Tiers | Damage (Netherite Sword) |
|---|---|
| 1 | 10.5 |
| 2 | 13 |
| 3 | 15.5 |
| 4 | 18 |
| 5 | 20.5 |
7. Knockback
The next sword enchantment on our list, one that is far better than those mentioned so far, is the Knockback. Most of the enemies you will be fighting with the sword are going to be in close quarters to you. Being that close can be quite dangerous, and having an ability that can effectively crowd control is important.
The Knockback is an extremely helpful and impressive enchantment that can keep most enemies away from you. At its maximum level, the Knockback enchantment can keep enemies away from you, and maintain your ability to escape difficult fights and manage mobs, even if you do not use sprint.
Perhaps the best thing about the Knockback enchantment is that it keeps creepers away, so they can’t explode on your face. You can combine this enchantment with other enchantments we’ll recommend later in this article such as the Sweeping Edge and Unbreaking for massive impact.
| Tiers | Knockback |
|---|---|
| 1 | 105% |
| 2 | 190% Knockback |
6. Mending
The sword enchantment, Mending, provides an immense amount of value. This enchantment is probably one of the most sought-after in Minecraft. With Mending you can restore the durability of your items by exchanging 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.
If you have Mending on any tool, your diamond or netherite sword can be incredibly beneficial. Since this means that so long as you keep killing mobs, your weapons 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 |
5. Sweeping Edge
One drawback of using the sword over any other weapon, such as the axe, is that it’s only able to hit one target at a time. This is why people prefer the axe because it can hit multiple enemies in a single strike. This is why the Sweeping Edge enchantment is perfect for swords.
The Sweeping Edge enchantment deals additional damage through sweeping attacks, which means that you can do even more damage to multiple enemies all at once. This is particularly impressive as an enchantment because it turns your sword into a cleaver that can mow down hordes and rows of foes easily.
| Tiers | Effect |
|---|---|
| 1 | 50% Additional Damage |
| 2 | 67% Additional Damage |
| 3 | 75% Additional Damage |
4. Fire Aspect
Our next sword enchantment is the Fire Aspect. One of the best assets in a battle is having additional forms of damage, and one of the best types of damage is fire damage. If you’re able to wield fire damage then your character becomes an absolute force to be reckoned with.
There are two levels of the Fire Aspect enchantment, and at the maximum level, you can deal a significant amount of Fire damage. Fire is especially powerful because several enemies take enhanced damage from the fire such as Piglins, Hoglins, skeletons, and most importantly Endermen.
Another lesser-known benefit is that when you cook an animal with a Fire Aspect sword, it cooks the meat you get from it too. Saves a few precious seconds, well worth the ranking, wouldn’t you agree?
| Tiers | Effect |
|---|---|
| 1 | Burn for 3 Damage |
| 2 | Burn for 7 Damage |
3. Unbreaking
The second best enchantment in Minecraft is Unbreaking. Similar to Mending, Unbreaking is an exceptionally powerful sword enchantment. After all, anything that can halt your sword from breaking and extend the usage of your diamond or netherite sword is incredibly useful.
The Unbreaking enchantment reduces the amount of durability reduction that your sword experiences as you keep using it. This enchantment is slightly better than Mending because it does not drain your experience points. Providing a massive boon, while not costing you anything to use.
| Tiers | Durability (Netherite Sword) |
|---|---|
| 1 | 4062 |
| 2 | 6069 |
| 3 | 8128 |
2. Looting
There is nothing more valuable than loot. And if you can increase your chances of obtaining drops, there is nothing better. Looting is perhaps one of the best sword enchantments that you can obtain, and it is particularly helpful because it can provide you with massive benefits by getting new items.
You can get additional Ender Pearls, Blaze Rods, and Wither Skeleton heads. All of which can be quite expensive. And can provide many additional rewards by exchanging. So Looting is an enchantment you want to make sure that you have on your sword.
| Tiers | Effect (Netherite Sword) |
|---|---|
| 1 | Increase drop rate by 2 +2% chance to get a Rare drop |
| 2 | Increase drop rate by 2 +2% chance to get Rare drop |
| 3 | Increase drop rate by 1 +1% chance to get a Rare drop |
1. Sharpness
And our winner for the best sword enchantments in Minecraft is the Sharpness enchantment. This has to be the all-around best damage-dealing enchantment that you can obtain. Sharpness vastly improves the amount of damage that your sword can do, and that’s precisely what you want your sword to be doing.
The Sharpness, enchantment adds additional points of melee damage to your sword. Unlike Bane of Arthropods and Smite, however, this additional damage is not specific to certain types of enemies but rather applies to all enemies within the game.
So Sharpness just becomes a massive boost to your overall damage and is useful in whatever circumstance that you might be in. Meaning you can rely on the Sharpness enchantment to successfully increase your damage in whatever scenario. Plus it works great on the Ender Dragon. S-tier enchantment what can I say?
| Tiers | Damage (Netherite Sword) |
|---|---|
| 1 | 9 |
| 2 | 9.5 |
| 3 | 10 |
| 4 | 10.5 |
| 5 | 11 |
There you have it folks, the best sword 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.