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. Java still charges 1 level for it.

Piercing from the enchanting table

The level you can roll depends on the item's enchantability. A material with a higher value reaches higher levels from the same level 30 enchant. This table shows the best Piercing each crossbow can get from a level 30 enchant with 15 bookshelves.

Anything higher has to come from a book instead. Then the enchanting table calculator shows the exact chance for every level.

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 4 levels. Building it from scratch takes 8 level I books and 7 merges, 28 levels in all. That is as cheap as books get, so it rarely decides the order.

Java charges the full resulting level every time, even when the item already has a lower level of it. 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. Level I costs 5–19 emeralds plus a 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.

Enchanting power and librarian prices

The power column is the hidden enchanting value each level needs. A level 30 enchant on a crossbow reaches power 36 at most. That already includes the enchantability bonus and the random spread. The price column shows what a librarian can ask for each book. Curing a zombie villager or the Hero of the Village effect lowers it.

Tips

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

Commands

Give yourself a Piercing book or enchant the item in your hand. These work in Java 26.3 once cheats are on.

Versions

Piercing is in every Java version from 1.21 (when enchantments became data files) up to 26.3.

Its costs, levels and items have not changed in that time.

Also see the update log for every change, and how this data is checked. Bedrock player? See Piercing on Bedrock.

Goes well with

• Curse of Vanishing
• Mending
• Quick Charge
• Unbreaking