What Does the Breach Enchantment Do in Minecraft?

Most damage enchantments make your weapon hit harder. Breach does something sneakier: it makes your enemy's armour protect them less. That makes it one of the most situational — and in the right fight, one of the strongest — enchantments in Minecraft. Here is how it works.

How Breach Works

Breach applies only to the Mace. When you hit a target, Breach ignores a percentage of their armour value, and each level adds another 15%:

At Breach IV, 60% of a target's armour simply stops counting. In practice, that means a Breach IV Mace can kill a player wearing full Protection IV netherite armour in about 8 critical hits — and with a Strength II effect active, that drops to roughly 4 critical hits against Protection IV netherite, iron or leather. The catch is that Breach only matters against targets that actually have armour points. Against the average zombie or skeleton in the wild, it does nothing at all. Armoured mobs, shulkers, magma cubes and the Wither are the exceptions where it earns its keep in single-player.

How to Get the Breach Enchantment

Enchanting Table

Place the Mace and lapis in an enchanting table and check the three offers. With 15 bookshelves around the table you can roll up to Breach III this way. To reach Breach IV, combine two Breach III Maces (or books) on an anvil.

Enchanted Books

Breach books can generate in any structure that holds enchanted books, but the most reliable source is the ominous vault in a trial chamber. Once you have a book, put the Mace in the left slot of an anvil and the book in the middle to apply it. Two matching Breach books can also be combined on the anvil to make a stronger one.

Breach vs Density: Which Should You Pick?

You have to choose, because Breach is incompatible with Density — and with Smite, Bane of Arthropods and the Mace's other damage enchantments. The decision comes down to who you are fighting. In a solo survival world, Density is the better default: it raises your damage against everything, provided you attack from height. Breach is the specialist's tool for multiplayer and PvP, where every opponent rolls up in enchanted netherite and armour penetration decides duels. Many serious players keep two Maces — a Density build for adventuring and a Breach build for fighting other players.

Which Targets Does Breach Actually Work On?

Breach only cares about one number: the armour points of whatever you hit. That includes other players, which is why it dominates PvP, but a handful of mobs qualify too. Zombies and skeletons that spawn wearing armour pieces lose much of that protection against a Breach Mace. Shulkers carry natural armour thanks to their shells, magma cubes have armour points as well, and the Wither boss is armoured — all legitimate Breach targets. Everything else in a normal survival world, from creepers to cave spiders, has no armour to ignore, and against them a Breach Mace performs exactly like an unenchanted one.

Levelling Breach Up on the Anvil

Because the enchanting table tops out at Breach III, most maxed-out Maces are finished on an anvil. Two Breach III books combine into Breach IV, and the same trick works lower down: two Breach I books make Breach II, two Breach II books make Breach III. Each combine costs experience levels, and anvil costs grow the more work an item has had done to it, so the efficient route is to combine books with books first and apply the finished Breach IV book to a fresh Mace as one of its first anvil operations. It takes a little planning, but it keeps the final cost low enough to actually afford.