Enchantment conflicts: only 18 of 43 conflict with anything, and six do most of it
26.2 ships 43 enchantments. 25 conflict with nothing at all, level 3 is the most common cap, and Curse of Vanishing applies to more items than any other enchantment.
Enchantment conflicts have a reputation for being fiddly, and the data says most of them are not. Counted from Mojang's shipped enchantment files for 26.2 — the same data the browser and the builder on this page read.
25 of 43 conflict with nothing
Only 18 enchantments are mutually exclusive with anything at all. The other 25 stack with everything they can legally go on.
And the 18 are not evenly spread — six carry most of the weight, all with five conflicts each:
sharpness, smite, bane_of_arthropods, impaling, density, breach
Those six are one family: the damage modifiers. They conflict with each other, which is the single rule that generates a third of all the conflict entries in the game. Once you know "only one damage enchantment per weapon", you have learned most of the system.
The next group is the protections — protection, fire_protection, blast_protection, projectile_protection — at three each, following the same one-per-armour-piece rule.
Everything else is a single pair: silk_touch/fortune, infinity/mending, depth_strider/frost_walker, multishot/piercing, and riptide against loyalty and channeling.
So the real shape is two families and five pairs, not 43 things to cross-reference.
Level 3 is the most common cap
| max level | enchantments |
|---|---|
| I | 9 |
| II | 4 |
| III | 16 |
| IV | 7 |
| V | 7 |
Level III is the default the game reaches for. Only seven enchantments go to V — and nine stop at I, where the enchantment is a binary capability rather than a magnitude (Silk Touch, Mending, Infinity, Aqua Affinity, Flame, Channeling, Multishot, and the two curses).
That is a useful default when writing a custom enchantment: if it is a "can do the thing" rather than "does the thing harder", vanilla makes it level I.
The curses apply to the most items
Sorting by how many item types each enchantment can go on:
vanishing_curse 92 · mending 83 · unbreaking 83 · binding_curse 38 · blast_protection 29
Curse of Vanishing is the single most broadly applicable enchantment in Minecraft — it goes on more item types than Mending or Unbreaking. That makes sense once stated (anything that can be held or worn can vanish) but it is the opposite of how people rank enchantments by importance.
At the other end, sixteen enchantments — well over a third of the list — apply to exactly one item type: breach, channeling, density, flame, impaling, infinity, loyalty, luck_of_the_sea, lure, multishot, piercing, power, punch, quick_charge, riptide, wind_burst.
Bows, crossbows, tridents and fishing rods account for nearly all of them, which is why those four items feel like they have deep enchantment trees while sharing almost nothing with the rest of the game.
Two curses, and that is the whole list
binding_curse and vanishing_curse. There is no third curse, and the tag that marks them is what a datapack should read rather than matching on the name — a custom enchantment called curse_of_something is not a curse to the game unless it is in the tag.
Writing a custom enchantment against this
Three defaults worth copying from vanilla rather than inventing:
- Conflicts are the exception. 25 of 43 declare none. Add an exclusivity set only when
two enchantments genuinely compute the same number, the way the damage family does.
- Cap at III unless you have a reason. It is the most common by a wide margin.
- Use level I for capabilities. If the enchantment either applies or does not, more levels
are noise.