Enchanting your items is a great way of making your Minecraft life easier. You can kill mobs faster, collect more resources, earn more loot, traverse water or stay alive longer. Repairing items is also important to make sure you always have those glorious enchantments available.
To get such enchantments, you need levels. Sprucing up enchanted items with further enchantments can be a real nightmare to obtain, as levels can be hard to come by. Fortunately there’s a myriad of ways to obtain experience.
I highly recommend you incorporate each of the following sources into your usual Minecraft routine. Don’t just go for experience when you need it, earning it over time can not only result in higher earnings, it’ll provide more resources of all kinds to help fund other methods, as well as filling your chests.
10. Bottle o’ Enchanting
Max level Cleric villagers will sell you this item for 3 Emeralds. It can also be commonly found in Pillager Outposts as well as rarely in treasure chests.
Throwing a Bottle o’ Enchanting to the floor will create between 3 and 11 experience points. Not anything to write home about (going from level 19 to 20 requires 57 experience) but it can be a nice little boost to your experience bar.
9. Combat
Going out at night to fight enemy mobs is one of the more fun ways to earn experience, albeit at a slower pace. Your usual mobs such as Zombies, Creepers, Spiders and Drowned will grant 5 experience per kill, with a slight increase if they have equipment (Normal difficulty or higher).
Killing neutral mobs is a good idea too, although they grant between 1 and 3 experience. Earning a collection of food, crafting resources and other items is a nice bonus.
Just make sure you do get some sleep between combat, Phantoms are so annoying to deal with.
8. Wither
Killing a Wither will drop 50 experience points, enough for one level up (depending on your level). Not much I know, but they are surprisingly easy to spawn and kill.
Getting a big stash of wither skulls built up, as well as an arena to fight the withers in, can be a fun and rewarding way to earn experience!
7. Breeding
Any survival playthrough will require a steady piece of farmlands, full of life. Breeding provides 1-7 experience which doesn’t sound like much, but it results in more animals. Once they get older, you can breed them too. Eventually you get get yourself hundreds of experience in mere minutes.
Once you feel you’ve got too many animals, commit genocide until there’s a dozen or so left. Even more experience, as well as a ton of food!
6. Pillager Raids
You don’t earn experience just from completing a raid but it sways villager prices in your favor, allowing you to get more trades (and more experience) for fewer resources.
Instead, focus on the raid mobs. First you’ll need to beat a group of Illagers to get the debuff. Then head to a village and go through 3-7 waves depending on difficulty.
Most Illager mobs grant the standard 5 experience but Ravagers and Evokers drop 20 and 10 experience respectively.
5. Fishing
Very relaxing and rewarding, a successful catch will result in a reward of between 1 and 6 experience points. With a rod utilising Lure, you can get a bite every 10 seconds maximum.
Fishing can also grant enchanted books, enchanted bows and other valuable items like saddles and leather.
The only downside is it gets quite tedious just staring at water. Best thing to do is use fishing as a downtime between big tasks, adventures or trades.
4. Mob Spawners
Finding a dungeon close to your base is a dream come true, providing a steady stream of mobs to continuously murder.
If you are done with the spawner, or too far away from home to access it regularly, break it with a pickaxe. It’ll yield 15-43 experience when it’s destroyed!
3. Mining
Coal ore can produce 0-2 experience, diamond/emerald ore 3-7, redstone ore 1-5 and lapis/nether quartz ore 2-5. Get yourself a Fortune pickaxe and go mining. You’ll come back many levels higher, with an inventory full of valuable gems and coal.
2. Trading
Performing a trade with a villager will give you 3-6 experience points. Many types of villagers exist and each one can perform a specific trade up to 5 times. With a full & healthy village, you can find yourself doing 100 trades per day; a lot of exp!
To optimize my Minecraft gameplay, I always make sure to have the best villagers to trade with. In addition to having a big Watermelon farm and an Axe with the Fortune enchantment to regularly harvest watermelons, I keep as many Farmer villagers as possible. These villagers are the best to trade with because they offer 1 Emerald for minimum of 4 Watermelon slices. This not only gives me a ton of experience points but also fills up my Emerald stash quite nicely, making it easier to obtain other valuable resources in the game.
1. Cooking/Smelting
While doing most, if not all of the previous entries, you’ll find yourself with a nice stash of uncooked meat, uncooked fish & ore.
Cooking such food will grant 0.35 experience per item, while iron ore will provide 0.7 each. Gold ore goes even higher with 1 experience per item.
Weirdly enough, smelting Cactus provides 1 exp per block, in Java Edition only (0.2 in Bedrock Edition). This makes desert biomes extremely experience-rich.
Blocks such as Sand, Cobblestone & Netherrack only give 6.4 experience per stack. Still decent but not worth dedicating time to.