Minecraft sword enchantments: all 10, what each adds, the best set
Ten enchantments fit a sword in 26.3, and three of them exclude each other. The damage, fire and loot numbers from the enchantment files, and the set worth building.
In Java 26.3 every enchantment is a data file under data/minecraft/enchantment/, and each file says which items it fits. Read all 43 of them and exactly 10 accept a sword:
| enchantment | max | on a sword it adds | enchanting table? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sharpness | V | +1 damage at I, +0.5 per level after — +3 at V | yes |
| Smite | V | +2.5 per level against undead — +12.5 at V | yes |
| Bane of Arthropods | V | +2.5 per level against arthropods, plus Slowness IV | yes |
| Knockback | II | +1 knockback per level | yes |
| Fire Aspect | II | sets the target on fire for 4 s per level | yes |
| Looting | III | more drops from mobs | yes |
| Sweeping Edge | III | sweep hits deal 1 + 50% / 67% / 75% of the attack | yes |
| Unbreaking | III | skips 50% / 67% / 75% of durability loss | yes |
| Mending | I | experience repairs the sword, 2 durability per point | no — treasure |
| Curse of Vanishing | I | the sword vanishes when you die | no — treasure |
The three that exclude each other
Sharpness, Smite and Bane of Arthropods sit together in #minecraft:exclusive_set/damage — along with Impaling, Density and Breach, which cannot go on a sword anyway. A sword gets one of the three.
Sharpness works on everything. Smite and Bane trade that for a much bigger bonus against a short list, taken from two entity tags:
- Smite — the 17 mobs in
#minecraft:undead: zombies, husks, drowned, zombie villagers, zombified piglins, zoglins, skeletons, strays, bogged, parched, wither skeletons, skeleton and zombie horses, camel husks, zombie nautiluses, phantoms and the Wither. - Bane of Arthropods — just five: spiders, cave spiders, bees, silverfish and endermites. A direct hit also applies Slowness IV for 1.5 seconds at level I; each level above that adds up to half a second more, to a random 1.5–3.5 seconds at V.
Smite V adds 12.5 damage to a diamond sword's 7 — nearly triple — so a sword kept for an undead mob farm is the one place it beats Sharpness.
What the numbers mean in a fight
Sword damage before enchantments, from the item definitions: wood and gold 4, stone and copper 5, iron 6, diamond 7, netherite 8, all at 1.6 attacks per second.
- Fire Aspect II keeps a mob burning for 8 seconds. It is also in the
#minecraft:smelts_loottag, which the meat loot tables check on the killing weapon — so a kill with it drops cooked meat even if the mob died before it caught fire. - Looting raises the drop ceiling of most mob loot tables by one per level, and adds 1% per level to the chance a mob drops the gear it spawned with.
- Sweeping Edge only changes the sweep — a full-strength hit on the ground, not a critical and not a sprint knockback. Without it a sweep deals a flat 1 damage to the mobs around your target; at III it deals 1 plus three quarters of your attack.
- Knockback is the one people take off: it pushes mobs out of reach of the next swing and out of a farm's kill zone.
The set worth building
With one damage enchantment and everything else that fits:
Sharpness V · Looting III · Fire Aspect II · Sweeping Edge III · Unbreaking III · MendingThat is six enchantments; Knockback II makes seven if you want it, and Curse of Vanishing is never worth adding on purpose. Swap Sharpness for Smite on a sword kept at an undead farm.
Mending cannot come from an enchanting table, so the finished sword is always an anvil job: Mending from a librarian, a fishing trip or a chest, combined with a table-enchanted sword. The order you combine books in decides whether the anvil says Too Expensive! before you finish — the Enchantment Calculator finds the cheapest order for the exact set you want.