Boots are the first piece of real armor you’ll likely acquire in an average game of Minecraft on survival mode. They take the least number of components to create, only four pieces of leather, iron, or diamond. Armor is important for your overall protection at night, in caves, or anywhere else monsters may lurk. But boots especially can play a very vital role in your exploration of the world beyond just keeping your hearts full and happy. For example, you’ll want leather boots inside any kind of snow-covered biome, as any loosely packed block of powdered snow could make you sink right down into it.
The benefits to boots don’t stop there, in fact, they only truly become obvious once you develop an enchanting table. But with so many varied options, what should you pick? We’ll help you decide which shoes to wear for your next adventure in this guide to the best boot enchantments in Minecraft.
Looking for more Minecraft tips and tricks? View all our Minecraft guides.
7 Best Boot Enchantments in Minecraft
Our picks for the best boot enchantments in Minecraft are sure to fit your needs. Let’s break it down.
1. Protection
Protection is mutually exclusive with all other forms of protection enchantment, as is true for all other forms of armor including boots. But among the various kinds of protection enchantments like blast, fire, or projectile protection, the regular old protection enchantment will reduce the most damage overall from the widest variety of sources. The others are specific enough that if you have very special plans, like raiding other players in PvP, you might want to consider them, but overall the regular protection enchantment definitely will save you the most health. And, it can also overlap with almost every other enchantment on this list, so it is always a good pick.
Protection is very easy to acquire, being one of the most common enchantments you’ll be presented with at the enchanting table.
2. Thorns
The thorns enchantment makes any mob that hits you take damage as well, with the downside that it also damages your equipment a little bit extra every time it dishes out damage itself. This can be a lifesaver in some big battles, especially if you’ve spread high levels of the thorns enchantment out across the rest of your armor. There is a slightly complex equation for determining how much, and how often, an enemy is hurt by thorns.
Every time you are struck, each piece of armor you wear with thorns on it gives you a 15% chance to hurt the enemy back for anywhere between 1-4 hearts worth of damage. Each level of thorns enchanted on your armor increases this chance by 15%, so if you wear even two pieces of level III enchanted thorn armor, you will have a 90% chance of doing damage every time you take it. The max damage that can be dealt by a thorns strike is 4 total.
Thorns are a fairly common enchantment to find at the enchanting table, but the third level of thorns can only be found as a loot drop. Occasionally you will even find armor that is already enchanted with thorns as well.
3. Mending
Mending will always be one of the best enchantments in Minecraft, regardless of which item it’s being applied to. It allows the XP orbs to absorb directly into the durability damage of an enchanted item, rather than being absorbed by the player to enchant new ones. Adding mending to a set of boots that already have a good number of desirable enchantments is a great idea. Mending can make your favorite items last forever, giving you a good excuse to give them all very fun names like any other magical-based RPG would do.
It’s also one of the most difficult enchantments to get ahold of. It can appear as chest loot, while fishing, or from trading with a Librarian villager. If you’ve built a full set of bookcases around your enchanting table, any Level 30 enchantments you apply to a tool, weapon, or armor piece come with a 1% chance of including Mending as a side enchantment.
4. Feather Falling
Feather falling is one of the best boot enchantments in Minecraft for insurance purposes. It can help you take significantly less damage from a long drop, and it is a unique enchantment to boots, making it a very important pick for overworld exploration. Every Minecraft player can remember a time they accidentally dug out just one too many blocks underneath them and fell into a deep, dark pit where they couldn’t even recover all of their hard-won gear. With feather falling, you take 12% less damage from a fall for every level of the enchantment you have applied to your boots. This can total up to a 48% reduction, almost cutting your fall damage in half. It can be further reduced by stacking protection enchantments onto various pieces of armor. With maximum protection, you can fall a little more than 100 blocks at a time without dying, although we wouldn’t recommend a base jump like that.
Feather falling can be very difficult to acquire. Its fourth level is one of the rarest enchantments to appear at the enchanting table, with only a 2.7% chance of it appearing in a fully developed library.
5. Depth Strider
The depth strider enchantment is a must-have for all your underwater adventures. If you see a water temple or a sunken ship in the distance, you’ll want a bit of extra speed to avoid the difficult guardian and elder guardian mobs. That’s where depth strider comes in. You’ll move a lot faster underwater with this boot enchantment applied, with 1/3 of the slowness effect that water applies being removed for every level of depth strider you have applied. This can be a huge bonus in some environments, with the water temples being some of the hardest places in the game to navigate typically. Depth strider does only affect horizontal movement underwater, so it will not make it easier to get to the surface faster. This is important to remember, especially if you don’t have any kind of water breathing aid applied. It can also overlap with the dolphin’s grace buff, allowing you to massively outpace the speed of a boat. You can turn yourself into a blocky Aquaman!
You can acquire depth strider at the enchanting table.
6. Soul Speed
Soul speed is an invaluable enchantment for adventuring in the nether. Massive chunks of the nether are made of soul sand or soul soil, like the soul deserts full of skeleton mobs. These areas can be difficult to traverse, as soul sand slows your movement, making you more susceptible to being hit by blasts from the ghasts floating above you. The soul speed enchantment not only negates the movement slowing effects of soul sand, but it also boosts your speed when you’re running on either of the “soul” blocks. The first level of the enchantment boosts your speed by a whopping 40%, with the next level bringing you to 51%, and the third and final level boosting you by 61.5%. You can use this to create quick passages for yourself, such as corridors full of soul soil between your nether portals. You can even place carpets on top of the soul blocks and still receive the speed bonus if you wish to hide the ghastly look of the soul sand.
The soul speed enchantment is most commonly found by bartering with the piglins inside the nether. You’ll need to throw a bunch of gold in their direction, in which case they will exchange random pieces of nether loot back to you. Some of this loot could be boots with the soul speed enchantment or books that allow you to apply it to any boots you wish at an anvil.
7. Frost Walker
Frost walker may be the most useful travel enchantment you can add to your boots. Whenever you step on a water block using your frost walking enchantment, it will freeze solid under your feet. It serves multiple purposes, like transit between water-bound places, but it also will keep you from taking damage from the magma blocks of the nether or from lighting yourself on fire by walking onto a campfire. The ice left behind will melt gradually after you step away from it, taking longer to melt in the dark of night compared to the sunshine of the day. It’s worth noting that frost walker does not do anything to prevent damage from lava, and any ice it does put out will melt rapidly around lava or other heat sources.
Frost walker can be hard to get ahold of, as it is only accessible as a treasure drop. You can find it in the various treasure chests distributed among jungle temples, and strongholds, occasionally from fishing, or possibly from trading with a high-level librarian.
Join the High Ground
That’s it for our guide to the best boot enchantments in Minecraft — thanks for reading! Tell your favorite in the comments, or let us know which enchantments we should cover next. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more guides on Minecraft and your other favorite games.
Happy gaming!
Related Reading
