Minecraft- Advanced Crafting One: Enchanting (Part One: Experience)

Enchanting is a skill in Minecraft that you can use to improve your armor and tools.  There are a number of random elements involved in enchanting your tools and armor, so keep in mind that not only aren’t you certain to have what you need to enchant your tools to the best of your ability, you may find that you got a different enchantment or group of enchantments than you wanted.  Because of this, you don’t want to be trying to enchant your tools when you only have one of each tool you intend to enchant- each item can only be enchanted once- so if you get enchantments you don’t like on your only diamond sword, you’re just stuck with it.  Also, using tools in your crafting window to ‘repair’ them will result in an unenchanted tool, even if both of the tools combined to make it had the exact same enchantments.

The first element necessary for enchanting is experience.  These little psychedelic orbs drop whenever you kill something- they’re less likely from chickens and more likely from dangerous mobs (monsters and wolves).  The more dangerous the monster, the more experience it’s going to drop- though the amount is semi-random.

Experience shows up in a green bar that pops up over your hotbar and under your health and hunger meters.  This fills up with green from left to right as you get more experience.  Once you have more than one bar, a number will appear in the middle of the experience bar.  This number is how many full bars of experience you have besides what is currently showing.  Experience is precious, but thankfully relatively easy to get (at least in small amounts), so grab it when you get it and keep ahold of it.

For instance, don’t die.  When you die, you respawn with zero experience.  What’s more, even if you can get back to where you were and pick up your stuff, most of your experience won’t even drop when you die.  This is one of the two factors that really make death a bad thing in Minecraft (the other being the potential to lose your structures in the vast world, thankfully alleviated by the use of a bed).

Unfortunately, it is not possible to store your experience somewhere and come back to get it- you can’t even drop it without dying.  Because of this, it is very important that even on a multiplayer server, everyone gets a shot at experience- and everyone has at least access to a (if not their own) ‘mob grinder’.

Experience is the basic building block of enchantments- but this being Minecraft, you also need tools to make the enchantments from the materials- and this is where a new table comes in.