How to craft a mace in Minecraft: one heavy core, one breeze rod
The mace is two items on a crafting table, but the heavy core drops from just 7.5% of ominous vaults. The recipe, the odds and the smash formula from the 26.3 code.
The mace is the cheapest recipe in the game to write down and one of the slowest to complete. In Java 26.3, data/minecraft/recipe/mace.json is a shaped crafting table recipe — not a smithing table one, and no template is involved:
# # = minecraft:heavy_core
I I = minecraft:breeze_rod → 1 × minecraft:maceThe breeze rod is the easy half. The heavy core is the whole problem.
The heavy core comes from one place
Apart from breaking one that has already been placed, exactly one loot table in the game produces a heavy core: chests/trial_chambers/reward_ominous_unique — the unique pool of an ominous vault. An ominous vault rolls that pool 75% of the time, and the heavy core is 1 of 10 weight in it:
| step | chance |
|---|---|
| ominous vault rolls its unique pool | 75% |
| heavy core wins that roll | 1 in 10 |
| heavy core per ominous vault | 7.5% |
That works out to 13 ominous vaults on average. The odds of having one after a given number:
| ominous vaults opened | chance of at least one heavy core |
|---|---|
| 5 | 32% |
| 9 | 50% |
| 20 | 79% |
| 30 | 90% |
An ominous vault only opens with an ominous trial key, which drops from a trial spawner that has been made ominous by entering the chamber with Bad Omen. Each vault opens once per player, so a second player at the same vault gets their own roll.
The breeze rod
A breeze drops 1–2 breeze rods, and only when a player kills it; Looting adds 1–2 more per level. Breezes spawn from the trial spawners in the same chambers, so by the time you have a heavy core you will have rods to spare — and spare rods matter, because they are also what repairs a mace in an anvil.
What you get
| stat | value |
|---|---|
| attack damage | 6 (the same as an iron sword) |
| attack speed | 0.6 per second — a full charge takes about 1.7 s |
| durability | 500, 1 per hit, repaired with breeze rods |
| enchantability | 15 |
On the ground the mace is a slow iron sword. Its point is the smash attack.
The smash attack formula
A hit counts as a smash when you have fallen more than 1.5 blocks and are not gliding with elytra. The bonus, straight from MaceItem.getAttackDamageBonus, is tiered by the blocks fallen:
| blocks fallen | bonus damage |
|---|---|
| first 3 blocks | +4 per block |
| blocks 3 to 8 | +2 per block |
| every block after 8 | +1 per block |
So a 3-block fall adds 12, an 8-block fall 22, and a 20-block fall 34. That bonus is added to the mace's 6 base damage — and then one more thing happens that most calculators leave out: a fully charged hit while falling, not sprinting, is a critical hit, and the game multiplies the whole thing, smash bonus included, by 1.5.
| fall | base + smash | as a critical hit |
|---|---|---|
| 3 blocks | 18 | 27 |
| 8 blocks | 28 | 42 |
| 10 blocks | 30 | 45 |
| 20 blocks | 40 | 60 |
A smash also cancels your own fall damage and resets your fall distance, and knocks back every other living thing within 3.5 blocks of the target — twice as hard when you fell more than 5 blocks. Tamed pets that belong to you and your allies are left alone.
The three mace enchantments
| enchantment | levels | effect | where from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Density | I–V | +0.5 smash damage per level, per block fallen | enchanting table, books |
| Breach | I–IV | target's armour counts 15% less per level | enchanting table, books |
| Wind Burst | I–III | launches you back up after a smash hit | ominous vaults only, as a level I book |
Density and Breach cannot share a mace — both are in the #minecraft:exclusive_set/damage set with Sharpness, Smite and Bane of Arthropods. A mace can take Smite or Bane, but never Sharpness, which is limited to swords, spears and axes. Density V on a 10-block fall adds another 25 damage before the critical multiplier.
Wind Burst never comes out of an enchanting table or a librarian: it is a treasure enchantment, and its only source is a Wind Burst I book in the ominous vault's rare pool, about 5.5% per vault. Combine two I books for II and two II books for III.
The ominous key economy is the slow part, so plan the chamber before you go in. The Trial Spawner & Raid Planner sets up trial spawners for solo or co-op and shows what making a chamber ominous changes.