How to get the Piercing Enchantment in Minecraft?

Here’s how to place the piercing enchantment on your weapons in Minecraft.

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The Piercing enchantment is one of the only enchantments specifically designed for arrows in Minecraft. You can apply this enchantment to crossbows, and it greatly increases the capabilities of your weapon, allowing your arrows to pierce through multiple enemies at once. The piercing enchantment also has multiple levels and increases the number of objects you can pierce through as you level up. 

How to Enchant your Weapon with the Piercing Enchantment? 

Enchanting your crossbow with the Piercing Enchantment allows your arrows to pierce through multiple objects in a single blow. With this enchantment, arrows don’t get destroyed and can also be retrieved after use. 

Add any crossbow to an Enchanting Table and use the Piercing Enchantment to enchant the item. You can also use an Anvil to achieve this, or a game command if you have enabled cheats. Your crossbow will initially be enchanted with Level 1, but you can level up to a Level 4 enchantment as you gain experience. 

Keep in mind that the Piercing Enchantment is incompatible with the Multishot enchantment.

The Piercing enchantment also allows you to attack up to five unique mobs with your crossbow with Level IV Piercing Enchantment, as you can pierce through one more mob than the enchantment level. 

How to get the Minecraft Piercing Enchantment

1

Enchanting Table

The first method involves using an Enchanting Table, which can be crafted using Obsidian, Diamonds, and a Book.

Simply place your crossbow into the Enchanting Table, along with some Lapis Lazuli, and click on one of the three options available to you, depending on your experience level.

Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing for sure whether you’ll get Piercing or some other enchantment. That’s why this method isn’t as effective if you just want to get Piercing.

2

Anvil and Enchanting Book

The second, more reliable method is to use an Anvil and an Enchanted Book. To do this, you’ll simply need to place your Crossbow and a Piercing Enchanted Book into the Anvil to combine them – at the expense of some experience levels.

Getting a hold of this book is the tricky part, though. You may find one in a Chest, but you can also trade with a Librarian villager to get one, or enchant a book on an Enchanting Table.

3

Fletcher trade

You may also come across a Crossbow already enchanted with Piercing when trading with a Master-level Fletcher. As a Fletcher is also a great way to farm Emeralds, you might already have one or two levelled up anyway. If not, we’d recommend it. And, since there aren’t that many Crossbow-suitable Enchantments available, the chances of getting a Piercing Crossbow this way are quite high.

How to Use the Piercing Enchantment in Minecraft?

Here’s how you can use the Piercing Enchantment: 

1. Fight large mobs: The piercing enchantment comes in handy when playing Minecraft in the Hardcore mode since you can easily tackle large numbered mobs with fewer ‘Piercing’ arrows. 
2. Pillager battles: Mobs aren’t the only enemies you can defeat with the piercing enchantment. Fighting Pillages is much easier when you use their own weapon (the crossbow) against them. 
3. Achievements: As well as the “Enchanter” achievement, which you will get the first time you use an Enchanting Table, there are two achievements unique to Piercing. “Two Birds, One Arrow” is unlocked when a player kills two Phantom with one arrow enchanted with Piercing, while “Arbalistic” is awarded for killing five unique mobs with one Piercing IV arrow.
4. Unlimited arrows: Ordinary arrows disappear once they’re fired, but you can actually retrieve arrows that are enchanted with Piercing. There are two benefits to this: you don’t have to keep enchanting arrows in the game, and you have a virtually unlimited supply of arrows. 
5. Pierces through shields: Other Minecraft players have what most mobs lack – shields. That’s where the piercing enchantment comes in handy since these arrows can pierce through shields with ease.

Does Piercing Do Extra Damage?

Technically, no. Piercing doesn’t deal out any extra damage to mobs or other players, it simply means you’re able to deal damage out to more enemies with a single shot. However, while you will still deal the same amount of damage to each individual mob, if you deal damage to five mobs with one arrow, you’re dealing more damage in one sense. What this means is, if your arrows will deal out one heart of damage with piercing, your shots will deal one heart of damage to every mob that you hit with each shot, so that’s up to five.

Other enchantments will allow you to deal more damage with each shot and some of them even combine with Piercing to turn your enchanted crossbow into the ultimate killing machine!

Best Minecraft Crossbow build

In order to have the strongest Crossbow possible, you’ll need to know which Enchantments are Crossbow compatible, and if any are mutually exclusive. As we’ve mentioned, Multishot and Piercing are unavailable on the same Crossbow in survival Minecraft, so you’ll need to chose one or the other – or carry two Crossbows!

The best Piercing Crossbow will have the following Enchantments:

• Mending
• Piercing IV
• Quick Charge III
• Unbreaking III

More Minecraft Enchantment guides

• How to enchant in Minecraft
• How to get the Piercing enchantment
• What is the Fire Protection enchantment?
• What does Bane of Arthropods do in Minecraft?
• All you need to know about the Aqua Affinity enchantment
• What does the Mending enchantment do?
• Everything you need to know about Looting
• What does the Smite enchantment do?
• What is Feather Falling? All you need to know
• What does the Minecraft Impaling enchantment do?

And head over to our Minecraft hub for even more news, guides, and how-tos!