What Does Piercing Do In Minecraft? – Everything You Need To Know

Any Minecraft player worth their salt will have had some form of experience with crossbows, either by using one or being on the receiving end of one. The big question however is what does piercing do in Minecraft?

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What Does Piercing Do In Minecraft
Credit: Mojang

How To Apply The Piercing Enchantment – What Does Piercing Do In Minecraft?

Before answering that question, players will need to know how to add the piercing enchantment to crossbows in the first place. Providing players have a crossbow to kick off with, they can add an enchantment on it named ‘Piercing’. How can players enchant a crossbow in the first place though? Here are three ways to do it:

  • Using an enchanting table. 
  • Combining enchanted crossbows with an anvil.
  • Combining an enchanted book with a crossbow with an anvil.

What Does Piercing Do In Minecraft?

Piercing allows arrows to travel through multiple mobs at once, cutting through anything from flesh to shield. It also allows players to have an infinite supply of arrows, simply find where the arrow landed to pick it back up.

There are four levels of the piercing enchantment altogether, with each level allowing players to fire arrows through one more enemy as the enchantments level increases. This means players can shoot an arrow through five enemies at once and then recover it, providing they can find where it landed. Arrows that end up in any other objects won’t be recoverable, so make sure to have a downward trajectory in mind for arrow recovery. 

Minecraft
Credit: Mojang

It’s also worth noting that anything else shot from a crossbow, such as fireworks, won’t benefit from the piercing enchantment. Another issue with piercing is that it can’t be combined with the multishot enchantment, which means players will have to choose between hitting multiple enemies with multiple arrows or using one arrow to line up enemies for the best shot instead.

However, a good workaround for this would be to have both the multishot and piercing ability mapped to a command to then work as expected. This would mean players can have an overpowered crossbow allowing for multiple arrows to be shot at once with the piercing enchantment. These would also be recoverable, but it would involve players cheating and using commands.

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