Best Minecraft Bow Enchantments Listed (2024)

Do you have the spirit of the hunter in you? Or do you simply favor distance-based combat strategy more than facing danger head-on? Regardless of your answer, bows are always a good weapon choice in Minecraft. And they get even stronger when you make special enchants that let you bend real-life rules. That’s magic for you. Here are the best Bow Enchantments in Minecraft.

So without further ado, it’s time to see which are the best bow enchantments currently available in Minecraft.

The Best Bow Enchantments in Minecraft Listed (2023)

Bows have seven different enchantments available. Since two of them are mutually exclusive, you can have a bow with up to six different enchantments at once. But it might not be worth the trouble of getting all of those at once.

1 – Power

The most basic, but perhaps most powerful enchantment of them all. It increases your overall damage with your bow, to the point where a single unenchanted fully charged shot deals less than half the damage of a Level V Power-enchanted shot would.

Related: Minecraft: Depth Strider Enchantment Explained

You should definitely use Power for your main bow, as it’s the most straightforward upgrade to it regardless of your ammo.

2 – Unbreaking

Having a strong weapon means nothing if it breaks easily. Unbreaking gives your tool/weapon a chance to avoid losing durability, meaning that you get to use that powerful bow more times before having to mend it.

The higher your Enchantment level, the more you’ll see it proc, so level it as much as you can. You may also want to combine it with Mending (more on it below) to ensure you never lose your bow to durability.

3 – Flame

Set your heart ablaze… and your enemies too! Your arrows now deal fire damage, increasing your damage even further. While it’s useless when it’s raining, it’s definitely worth the investment. 

Related: Top 20 Best Minecraft 1.20.1 Seeds for August 2023 (Via GameSkinny)

Curiously, the flaming arrow won’t affect regular blocks outside of enemies, players, and ignitable blocks (like TNT or candles), so there’s no danger of accidentally burning down your house with a missed shot. And I’m glad for that because I’m pretty sure my friends would do it the moment they saw the bow.

4 – Punch

Have you heard about long-distance jabs? That’s basically what this enchantment does. It increases the knockback propriety of your arrows by a significant marge, increasing the more you enchant it. It doesn’t increase your damage directly, but helps you maintain distance from the targets.

It can be considered quite a niche enchantment, but if you’re choosing to use a bow instead of a sword, you probably want to keep that Creeper, zombie, or whatever it is that you’re fighting with as far as possible, so arrow punch them to the face!

5 – Mending

By using some of your Experience, you can immediately fix your bow. You must find it somewhere before applying it to a weapon, but it’s definitely helpful even when you already have Unbreaking. 

Related: How to Make a Chimney in Minecraft

But since Unbreaking is a thing (and a powerful thing, by all sorts), Mending might sound redundant, so you can skip it for something else. It might be better applied to a piece of armor or sword if you’re not a big bow user too.

Mending and Infinity are mutually exclusive, so chose which of them you’re keeping.

6 – Infinity 

One of the best enchantments for the early game, but falls quite hard as you progress. Infinity allows you to keep shooting as long as you have one regular Arrow in your inventory, so it’s literally infinite ammo. The problem is that it only works for regular Arrows.

Spectral and Tipped Arrows will still be consumed as usual, and those are the ones you should be using after a while in the game. And having regular Arrows won’t be a problem either after exploring some temples and dungeons around the map. 

Infinity is mutually exclusive with Mending, so you can only have one of them. And Mending does find an use later in the game, so it’s the superior choice.

7 – Curse of Vanishing

Unsurpsinginly, we have the Curse of Vanishing at the bottom of the list. Just as its name implies, this is more of a curse than a blessing. Your bow disappears after you die, and that’s it. Why would you want that, you may ask? Well, for single-player mode this is literally useless, but it can be helpful when playing online servers with hostile players.

It may also see some use when playing casually with your friends with some self-imposed rules like “you lose your inventory when you die and no one can get your things back”. Outside of those situations? Just pretend this one doesn’t exist.

And those are the best enchantments for Bows in Minecraft. All of them are quite useful overall, so you can never go wrong with any of them (maybe with Curse, but let’s ignore that part). And if you’re already breaking the limits of your weapons, it might be worth doing the same with your armor by using some Trims.