6 Best Minecraft Pickaxe Enchantments, Ranked

You'll swing a pickaxe more than any other tool in Minecraft, so the enchantments on it quietly decide how fast your whole world progresses. Strip mining, hunting diamonds, clearing a perimeter — all of it runs through this one item. There are only six enchantments a pickaxe can take, but two of them refuse to coexist, which forces a real choice. Here's what each one actually does and which ones deserve your XP.

All Pickaxe Enchantments at a Glance

Efficiency: The One You'll Feel Every Minute

Efficiency simply makes the pickaxe break blocks faster, and at level V the difference is dramatic — stone and deepslate that once took a beat now fall almost as fast as you can move the mouse. It only speeds up blocks a pickaxe is meant to mine, so it won't help a stone pickaxe chew through obsidian any quicker. Paired with a Haste II beacon, an Efficiency V netherite pickaxe deletes stone instantly, which is why every serious mining setup starts here.

Fortune vs Silk Touch: Pick One Per Pickaxe

Fortune is the money-maker. Each level raises the chance of extra drops from ores, and Fortune III averages out to more than double your haul — a single diamond ore can drop up to four diamonds. It also boosts flint from gravel, apples and saplings from leaves, and crops like potatoes and carrots. If you mine it with Fortune, you get more of it.

Silk Touch plays a completely different game: blocks drop in their original form. Diamond ore comes home as diamond ore, glass panes survive being broken, and you can collect grass blocks, bookshelves, ender chests and even ice without destroying them. It's the only way to relocate certain blocks, and it lets you stockpile ore blocks and process them later with Fortune whenever you actually need the gems.

The catch is that the two are mutually exclusive. You cannot put Fortune and Silk Touch on the same pickaxe, which is why experienced players eventually craft one of each and swap depending on the job.

Unbreaking and Mending: The Immortality Package

Unbreaking gives the pickaxe a chance to skip durability damage each time it mines. At level III, a tool lasts roughly four times as long as normal. Mending goes further: while you hold or wear the tool, XP orbs route into repairs instead of your XP bar — two durability restored per orb — so a pickaxe fed by a mob farm effectively never breaks.

Mending is a treasure enchantment, which means the enchanting table will never offer it. You'll get the book from librarian villager trades, chest loot, fishing or raids, then apply it with an anvil. On a netherite pickaxe, Mending plus Unbreaking III is close to non-negotiable.

Curse of Vanishing: The Odd One Out

The curse makes your pickaxe vanish from the world when you die instead of dropping for anyone to grab. That's occasionally useful on competitive PvP servers where you'd rather your gear disappeared than arm a rival, but in normal survival it's a pure downside. If a looted pickaxe comes with it, use the tool freely — just never add the curse yourself.

The Two Pickaxes Worth Building

Because a pickaxe can hold at most five of the six enchantments, the endgame answer is two specialised tools:

• The Fortune workhorse: Efficiency V, Fortune III, Unbreaking III, Mending — your daily driver for caving and ore runs.
• The Silk Touch specialist: Efficiency V, Silk Touch, Unbreaking III, Mending — for building materials, ender chests and ore blocks you want to bank.

Build the Fortune one first. It pays for the second.