What does the Breach enchantment do in Minecraft?

Minecraft’s 1.21 update introduced the mace, a melee weapon that gets its uniqueness from damage that directly scales with fall damage. Not only can you use it to eliminate fall damage altogether in some cases, but using enchantments like Breach lets you shred through some of the game’s toughest enemies.

How to get the Breach Enchantment in Minecraft

You can find the Breach enchantment in an enchanted book or through an enchanting table. However, since it’s a mace-exclusive enchantment, you’ll have to use your mace in your enchanting table for a chance to find it. You can also randomly find it in enchanting books within underground structures or villager trading, but the odds are low compared to more common enchantments like unbreaking, protection, and sharpness.

Just be careful, as you’re not guaranteed to find it right away while enchanting, especially if you have a low-level enchanting table. You’re much more likely to find it with level 30 enchantments, but you can encounter level one and two versions of Breach at lower levels.

Make sure you’re not applying the density enchantment instead by hovering over your enchant options. It’s impossible to get Breach on a mace that already has smite, bane of arthropods, or density enchantments in vanilla Minecraft, making this a great way to tell whether your next enchantment will have Breach at all. While you can use console commands to apply them all, you won’t be able to use them all together in a regular game.

In short, if your mace already has one of these three enchantments, you’ll have to create a new mace or remove the enchantments to use Breach. Similarly, if you hover over an enchantment and see density appear, you’ll know you won’t get the Breach enchantment and will have to try again with a new set of enchants.

How the Breach Enchantment works in Minecraft

Breach is a mace enchantment that reduces armor’s effectiveness, making enemies and other players less tanky. There are four enchantment levels, with the lowest decreasing armor effectiveness by 15 percent and the highest, level four, reducing it by 60 percent. While its power isn’t too noticeable with regular leather armor, having diamond or netherite armor with protection IV is where its strength truly shines.

This effect also impacts natural armor that creatures like zombies, shulkers, and even the Wither boss have. If you’re fighting against any of these enemies, you’ll have a much easier time fighting them than with a regular sword, even if it has sharpness or other damage enchantments. However, it won’t make much difference against enemies like spiders or creepers with no armor buffs.