Minecraft Vault Block Guide: Where to Find It, How to Unlock It and All Loot

Every multiplayer player knows the pain of reaching a loot chest five minutes after a friend emptied it. The vault is Mojang's answer: a loot block that remembers who has claimed it and rewards each player once. It is one of the smartest additions in the Tricky Trials update, and it is worth understanding properly before your next trial chamber run.

What Is the Vault?

The vault is a dark, see-through block with a face on the front, a bit like a meaner cousin of the trial spawner. Walk away and it sits dark and silent with its mouth shut. Step close, and it wakes up: the mouth opens, orange particles drift out, and the block starts cycling through the items it might give you, like a slot machine previewing the prizes.

You cannot craft a vault, pick one up, or move it in survival. It has very high blast resistance, and even mining one with a netherite pickaxe takes a long time and drops nothing — all deliberate, so nobody can steal or destroy a vault that other players have not claimed yet.

Where to Find Vaults

Vaults generate only in trial chambers. Most sit proudly on a small throne of copper blocks in rooms with trial spawners, but the chambers like to hide the occasional vault in awkward corners, and a few peaceful rooms — like the one with the tree — have a vault with no fight attached at all. A chamber usually holds several vaults, though you will rarely find one in the corridors; those hold decorated pots instead, which are worth breaking since pots can contain trial keys.

How to Unlock a Vault

There is no inventory screen. Simply hold a trial key and right-click the vault. It spits its items onto the floor, the mouth closes, and the block goes dark — for you. That vault will never pay you again, but if a teammate who has not opened it walks up, it lights up for them.

Trial keys come from completing trial spawner challenges (a 50% drop from each finished spawner), plus chamber chests and decorated pots. There is also a tougher sibling, the ominous vault, opened with an ominous trial key — a separate block with its own, better loot pool.

Vault Loot Table

Each unlock ejects a random number of items in varying stack sizes. Here are the headline chances:

That 1.8% trident is one of the only renewable-ish ways to chase the weapon outside of drowned farming, and the Bolt trim drops nowhere else. Bring every key you earn — a chamber run that ends with unopened vaults is loot left on the table.