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The bow is easily the most versatile weapon in Minecraft, with the ability to load magical arrows and fire rapidly at targets either close to you or far away. With skeletons and pillagers abound, you need to have a bow in your arsenal to counter them. A bow with a good supply of arrows is an absolute necessity for adventures into the nether. Once you’ve reached a point in the game where you can start enchanting your bows, the flurry of options you’re presented with can make it difficult to select just one.
We’re here to help sort through those many choices and build the ultimate bow. First, we’ll go through four different enchanting options that can all stack together, in the order you should apply them, letting you create a powerful weapon with no room for compromise. Then we’ll talk about the real choice you do have to make, between an infinite bow or infinite ammo.
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4 Bow Enchantments You Should Stack Together
Apply these bow enchantments by starting with unbreaking then ending with punch. Enchantment stack order: Unbreaking ➡️ Power ➡️ Flame ➡️ Punch.
1. Unbreaking
Unbreaking is one of the more basic enchantments you can apply to almost any item in Minecraft. It reduces the chance of your equipment taking durability damage during any time it would have, whether that’s when a tool is being used or a piece of armor is being damaged. In the case of a bow, unbreaking can be very important for long journeys, as you don’t want your bow snapping right in the middle of an important battle. It’ll let you use the same bow for longer, and that’s important if you’re planning on stacking three other enchantments on the same item.
Unbreaking can come in levels 1-3. If you have to choose, you should go ahead and make unbreaking the first enchantment you add to your new bow.
2. Power
The power enchantment comes in five different levels, all of which increase the amount of damage your bow can do. At level five, it will be raising each arrow from doing a meager 3 hearts of damage all the way up to 7.5 hearts, enough to drop almost every basic enemy in the game. Even having the lower levels of the power enchantment make a huge difference, especially out in the nether. You can drop the ghast creatures out of the sky without needing to waste more arrows and more difficult shots against them.
For simple efficiency, you should get the power enchantment early on if you can, as it’ll let you use half as many arrows while they’re at a premium. In newer versions of the game, you can now acquire the power enchantment through the enchanting table, even the highest levels of it provided you have the 15 bookshelves in your enchanting library. High levels of it can also be found as enchanted books hidden within the chests of various structures.
3. Flame
The flame enchantment is where things finally get a little more interesting. Whereas the other enchantments we’ve listed to add to your new bow here are all very mechanically minded, increasing stats you can’t really see beyond their effects in the background. Flame is not subtle like the others. It lets you act like Link from Legend of Zelda and fire flaming arrows at both your enemies and various flammable targets.
Lighting TNT from a distance has never been easier than with a flame-enchanted bow. Arrows will always catch on fire if shot directly over a pool of lava, and that effect is duplicated by the flame enchantment on your bow. It will light your targets aflame while still dealing physical damage. Each tick of fire damage deals 2.5 hearts, and the fire lasts an entire five seconds. If your bow already has Power V applied as we recommended above, that means you’re dealing 20 health points of damage every attack, twice what it takes to kill an unarmored player character. Even the deadly ravager that can attack during a pillager raid only has around fifty hearts of health, letting you drop one by firing three times and letting the fire kill it.
The biggest downside to the Flame enchantment is that if the fire itself does kill your target, you won’t receive any loot. So try to land a second arrow after the first anyway if you are trying to collect anything of value.
4. Punch
The punch enchantment is only useful in certain situations, but given that it doesn’t take up a slot that you could even give to anything else, it’s worth applying if you’ve already got the other options applied to your bow. Punch knocks any target you hit backwards by three blocks worth of space. It can be very useful in PVP applications, as getting knocked back is very disorienting and potentially hazardous if you’re fighting around any kind of elevation. Punch is super useful in the nether where sharp falls are around every corner and many of your opponents have lots of health.
Punch is most useful against mobs that are trying to attack you up close, but you can also potentially knock a skeleton out of range for their own bow attacks if you can beat them in a quick draw contest. Punch can be used to push mobs into traps for whatever nefarious purposes you may come up with to try and contain a mob. There are two levels of punch, with the second giving you more knockback. Skipping punch is acceptable, but if you plan on making this ultimate bow your main weapon, you may as well apply it anyway.
Now that you’ve got a bow with extra durability, more damage, flaming arrows, and knockback, it’s time to finally make a big choice for your fifth enchantment.
Infinite Bow or Infinite Ammo?
5. Mending
Mending is widely regarded as the top enchantment in the game, and for good reason. It applies XP you acquire from things like monster slaying, coal mining, or animal ranching, directly into durability repairs for the enchanted item. This means every time you do any activity that grants you XP, your bow could be magically repaired, potentially keeping it in your hands forever. The bow has less durability than a lot of other items, so it may be the right choice for your mending.
IUltimately, we’d recommend saving mending for other items unless you’ve already got very high levels of all the above enchantments applied to the bow and are certain you want to use it as your main weapon for the rest of your adventures. This is because mending can be applied to lots of other items, and conflicts with the final enchantment we’ll be talking about today if you do apply it to a bow.
6. Infinity
Infinity is a relatively rare enchantment that is unique to the bow. It can be acquired at the enchanting table by characters level 30 and above that are using a fully equipped table and library. Infinity allows you to use a single arrow an infinite number of times, meaning you won’t need to keep plucking chicken feathers and sifting through piles of gravel looking for flint. This is obviously a huge advantage from an economical standpoint, as it lets you use the bow without needing to even worry about where you’re aiming. It feels like an old-school cheat code for infinite ammo!
The disadvantages to infinity are that it conflicts with mending, meaning you’ll need to be spending a lot of XP to keep the bow repaired via an anvil if it has a lot of enchantments attached to it already. Also, you cannot duplicate special magic arrows like the arrow of harming or the arrows of slowness with an infinity bow, if you do shoot them out of it they will be depleted as normal.
Join the High Ground
That’s it for our list of the best bow enchantments in Minecraft! Now you’ve got a bow in your hands that can really contend with anything you might encounter out there, whether it’s a mass of skeletons in the overworld, the horrors of the nether, or the true final boss of the game, the Ender Dragon. Ultimately, it all comes down to that choice of mending vs infinity, as the rest can just stack together. With this bow, you can rest assured you’ll hit your mark as you take the higher ground.
