Piercing

What Piercing does

Book cost is the anvil cost of putting that book on a fresh item. However, already-used items add their prior work penalty: work it out in the calculator.

How Piercing works

A Piercing arrow flies through the mob it hits and keeps going. Each level lets it pass through one more target, so a Piercing IV arrow can hit five mobs in a row. It stops when it hits a block.

Piercing arrows can always be picked up again, even after they pass through mobs. So a Piercing crossbow wastes fewer arrows than a Multishot one.

Where Piercing shines

• Narrow corridors and one-block tunnels, where mobs line up.
• Mob farms with a narrow kill channel.
• Raids that come at you through a gate or a bridge.
• Bridges and paths where you can line up several mobs with one shot.

Piercing or Multishot?

They exclude each other. Piercing hits targets in a line, while Multishot covers a fan with three arrows. In open fields Multishot often hits more mobs. In tight spaces Piercing wins, and it keeps your arrows. Fireworks are the big exception: Piercing does nothing for rockets, while Multishot triples them. The Multishot vs Piercing page explains when each one wins.

In a build

A Piercing crossbow usually carries Piercing IV, Quick Charge III, Unbreaking III and Mending. Piercing is a ×1 book, so Piercing IV costs only 4 levels. That is the Piercing variant on the best crossbow enchantments page.

Lining up targets

A Piercing arrow stops at the first block it hits. So fight from the end of a corridor or a bridge, where mobs walk toward you in a line. Shooting along the line, not across it, gets the most hits from every arrow.

Is Piercing worth it?

Yes, if you fight in tight spaces or want to keep your arrows. Because Piercing arrows can always be picked up, a Piercing crossbow costs almost nothing to run. However, if you use fireworks, pick Multishot instead.

Piercing on the anvil

Piercing is the cheapest crossbow book. Therefore it fits into any anvil order without trouble, even at the end.

Common mistakes

• Loading fireworks into a Piercing crossbow and expecting the rocket to pass through mobs. It explodes on the first one.
• Using Piercing in open areas, where mobs rarely line up.
• Looking for Piercing on a bow. It only goes on crossbows.

Which items take Piercing

Piercing goes on 1 kind of gear in the calculator: crossbow. An enchanting table can roll it on the crossbow.

It can't share an item with Multishot. If an item already has one of those, the anvil skips the Piercing book.

Anvil cost of Piercing

Piercing has an anvil multiplier of 1 from another item and 1 from a book. So a Piercing IV book costs 4 levels on a fresh item, and each lower level costs 1 less. Two fresh Piercing III books merge into Piercing IV for 1 level. Building it from scratch takes 8 level I books and 7 merges, 17 levels in all. That is as cheap as books get, so it rarely decides the order.

Bedrock only charges for the levels a book adds. So upgrading a lower level costs only the difference. Every step also adds the prior work penalty of both items. The enchantment calculator finds the cheapest order for your whole set of books.

Builds, questions and guides

Piercing can go on 1 item: best crossbow enchantments. To put it on in the cheapest order, see the crossbow enchant order.

Common questions: can you put Multishot and Piercing on a crossbow?

More reading: Getting books from librarians, How to enchant in Minecraft, Every max enchantment level. You can make a Piercing book with the command generator. The librarian price list shows what villagers charge for it.

How to get Piercing

• Enchanting table It can appear when you enchant a supported item at an enchanting table. However, higher levels need more bookshelves and a level 30 enchant.
• Librarian villagers Librarians can sell it as an enchanted book.
• Random enchanted books It is also in the pool for the random enchanted books and gear in many chests and in fishing loot.

Piercing is the most common crossbow enchantment at the table, so a level 30 enchant on a crossbow often includes it. Librarians sell it too, and the cheap ×1 book makes merging two Piercing III books into IV easy.

Tips

• Piercing arrows can always be picked up again, even after passing through mobs.
• It excludes Multishot.

Commands

Hold the item and run this command in Bedrock 26.60 with cheats on. Bedrock's /enchant only goes up to the max level. Its /give command can't add enchantments.

Goes well with

• Curse of Vanishing
• Mending
• Quick Charge
• Unbreaking