As the name of the game suggests, mining is a massive part of gameplay in Minecraft. Players will regularly need to scour the vast world for materials and many of the best ones can only be obtained by utilizing a pickaxe.
The pickaxe is perhaps the most crucial tool in all of Minecraft. Without it, players will struggle to craft and stay alive, meaning that players will want to not only ensure that they have a strong one, but also apply powerful enchantments to it to truly maximize its potential.
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There are many unique enchantments in Minecraft, and it can be difficult to figure out which ones can be applied to which piece of gear and which ones are actually worth spending your precious levels on. If you want to be as successful and efficient as possible, it’s important to ensure that all of your armor is equipped with the best enchantments that are available.
When it comes to the pickaxe, there are only a handful of enchantments to choose from and most of them are immensely helpful.
All pickaxe enchantments in Minecraft
In total, there are six different enchantments that can be applied to a pickaxe in Minecraft.
- Efficiency (I-V)
- Fortune (I-III)
- Silk Touch (I)
- Unbreaking (I-III)
- Mending (I)
- Curse of Vanishing (I)
While there are six available enchantments, not all of them can be applied on the same pickaxe since some of these enchantments conflict. Fortune and Silk Touch cannot exist on the same pickaxe, but all other enchantments can.
Best pickaxe enchantments in Minecraft 1.19
Generally, it is best to not enchant any pickaxe until you have obtained either a diamond or Netherite one. Enchanting any piece of gear in Minecraft is quite costly and pickaxes made of lesser materials are more prone to break and are less effective overall.
Out of the enchantments that can be applied to pickaxes in Minecraft, the best ones are as follows.
1) Fortune
The powerful Fortune enchantment makes obtaining loot much more efficient. To ensure this enchantment is as powerful as possible, you’ll want to enchant your pickaxe with Fortune III rather than either of the lower levels.
Fortune essentially increases the amount of loot that drops when players mine something with a tool that has Fortune applied. This enchantment can function differently depending on the resource that players are mining.
With Fortune III applied to a pickaxe, players will receive between extra drops for each block that they mine of the following.
- Coal ore
- Gold ore
- Iron ore
- Diamond ore
- Lapis Lazuli ore
- Emerald ore
- Copper ore
- Redstone ore
- Nether quartz ore
- Nether gold ore
- Amethyst clusters
Some mineable assets utilize a different loot system, which means that Fortune functions a bit differently for them than the previously mentioned mineable items. For some of the following assets, the percentage chance for an extra drop goes up with Fortune and players may thus receive extra drops when mining them.
- Glowstone
- Sea Lanterns
- Melons
- Wheat Seeds
- Beetroot Seeds
- Nether Wart
- Sweet berries
- Gilded Blackstone
- Gravel
- Leaves
- Twisting Vines
- Weeping Vines
Perhaps most importantly for players struggling to get a Flint from Gravel, Fortune III ups the chance to 100 percent, meaning players will always obtain Flint thanks to their trusty enchanted pickaxe.
2) Mending
If you’re going to be investing your experience levels into enchanting a pickaxe, ensuring that you apply the Mending enchantment early on is crucial. This enchantment essentially restores the durability of the item that it is applied to with experience points.
Mending does not take away the experience points you earn, but utilizes them to replenish the health of your tools or armor. As long as you continue to mine, you will always gain experience from most ores which means that your pickaxe will continuously be restored to full durability.
The Mending enchantment only has one level, but this one level is all that players will ever need to ensure that their weapon never breaks.
3) Unbreaking
To truly ensure that your pickaxe is unbreakable, it is an excellent idea to also equip it with Unbreaking III. What this enchantment does is grant a chance for the pickaxe to not consume a point of durability after mining something, which means that it will break much more slowly.
Unbreaking and Mending are an extremely powerful combination together and players should equip both to create the most efficient pickaxe possible. As long as player continuously utilize their pickaxe to perform actions that grant experience, like mining, then these two enchantments will ensure that the pickaxe continuously replenishes itself.
4) Efficiency
If you want to be the quickest miner of all, you’ll want to equip your pickaxe with Efficiency V. This enchantment will substantially increase your mining speed which will allow you to collect resources much more quickly.
You may struggle to obtain the highest level of this enchantment because it is not available at the enchantment table for stone or diamond tools. If you want to apply Efficienty V to a pickaxe that is made with either, you’ll instead need to do so by combining two pickaxes that have Efficiency IV at an anvil.
This process can be rather costly, but the efficiency that this enchantment grants during mining is well worth the effort. To ensure that you are not wasting your hard-earned levels, it is generally best to only apply this enchantment to either a diamond or Netherite pickaxe.
5) Silk Touch
This enchantment is great, but it should always be applied to a different pickaxe than the main one that you utilize because it will sometimes mess up what you are trying to do. Silk Touch only has one level to it and is powerful for certain situations like obtaining a bee nest, ice, or mushroom blocks.
Silk Touch allows players to pick up certain blocks as they are rather than as the loot they drop. This can be confusing to understand until you see it in action, but an excellent example of this process is that instead of mining a bookshelf and receiving three books for doing so, Silk Touch grants players the already-made bookshelf.
Perhaps one of the most common and frequent reasons that players regularly utilize this enchantment is to break glass without losing it entirely. Silk Touch drops the actual glass block rather than nothing, which is what players will always obtain from breaking their windows without it.
While Silk Touch is a powerful enchantment, it does conflict with Fortune, meaning that players can only have one of the two applied on one pickaxe. Generally, the best way to handle this conflict is to have two enchanted pickaxes ready to go so that you can choose either the one with Fortune or the one with Silk Touch as needed.
If you don’t want to make a second pickaxe and instead want to choose between the two enchantments, Fortune is a much more useful enchantment. But there will likely be situations where you do want to utilize Silk Touch as well, especially if you are a builder, so consider obtaining both.
Outside of the five enchantments that are great for pickaxes, the only other enchantment available for this tool is Curse of Vanishing. As the name hints, this is a curse and thus a bad aspect to have on any piece of equipment in Minecraft.
With the Curse of Vanishing applied, players will lose any item that has this enchantment if it is in their inventory when they die. If you find a powerful piece of gear with this curse applied, you unfortunately cannot remove it, which makes it quite difficult to utilize any item that has this applied.
While the Curse of Vanishing is terrible for most situations, there are instances where players may find it tolerable or even useful. Minecraft players that are playing on a hardcore world don’t need to worry about it since they only have one life. Additionally, those who play on multiplayer servers have sometimes been known to prank friends or willingly apply it to their own loot to ensure that others can not obtain it if they try to kill them.
While there are currently only six enchantments available for the pickaxe, it is possible that more could arrive in a future Minecraft update. The Swift Sneak enchantment is the newest one to join the game and arrived with the 1.19 Wild Update.
The next big Minecraft update is 1.20 and will arrive sometime this year. No new enchantments seem to be on the horizon in this update so far, but the Swift Sneak enchantment was a surprise addition which means that players should not rule it out entirely.
