The Minecraft mace: recipe and best enchantments

You craft a mace from one heavy core and one breeze rod: place the core on the crafting table and the rod directly beneath it. The core is the hard part, because it only comes from ominous vaults in trial chambers.

Below we cover where to find both parts, how the smash attack works and which enchantments belong on it. Checked against Java 26.3 and Bedrock 26.52.

How do you make a mace?

The recipe is short; collecting the parts isn’t. A normal swing does 6 damage, about the same as an iron sword, and the mace is slow. What makes it special is the smash attack: hit something while you’re falling at least one and a half blocks, and the further you fall, the harder you hit. Land the hit and you take no fall damage yourself.

Every block counts: the first three blocks add 4 damage each, the next five add 2 each and every block after that adds 1. According to Mojang, a 2-block fall deals 14 damage, 9 blocks deal 29 and 100 blocks deal 120. You don’t need a tower either: launch yourself upwards with a wind charge first.

Heavy core and breeze rod: where do you find them?

• Breeze rod: drops from a breeze, a wind mob that only lives in trial chambers. Kill one yourself and you get 1 or 2, more with Looting. One rod also crafts into 4 wind charges.
• Heavy core: only found in ominous vaults. You need an ominous trial key for those, and you only get one during an ominous trial. The chance of a core is 7.5% per vault.

You start an ominous trial by drinking an ominous bottle and walking into a trial chamber. Step by step, it’s all in Minecraft trial chambers. Every player can open every vault once, so with friends everyone gets their own shot at a core.

The best mace enchantments

The mace has three enchantments of its own. Density and Breach can’t go together, and Smite and Bane of Arthropods don’t combine with either of them.

Against mobs, Density V with Wind Burst III is a strong combination: after each hit you bounce back up for the next. Against players in good armour, Breach IV does more, even on a normal swing. Wind Burst only comes as a level I book, with a 5.5% chance per ominous vault; combine four of them on an anvil to reach level III. The rest of the enchantments are in the best Minecraft enchantments.

To repair it, use breeze rods on an anvil, each restoring a quarter, or combine it with a second mace.

The mace in PvP: fair or not?

In PvP the mace is a big step up. According to the Minecraft Wiki, a player in full netherite armour with Protection IV goes down after a 10-block fall and a critical hit from a Density V mace. With Breach IV it takes 19 blocks, unenchanted 30.

There’s a trade-off, though. The mace is slow, lasts 500 hits in Java and 501 in Bedrock, and a missed smash still costs you fall damage. And no core means no mace.

Setting mace rules on your server

On your own server you decide how heavy the mace gets to hit:

• Turn PvP off. With /gamerule pvp false players can’t hurt each other any more, in Java and in Bedrock. More on that in edit the settings in server.properties.
• House rules. Agree the mace is for the arena only, or for mobs only. Put it in your SMP rules; tips are in how to start a Minecraft SMP.
• A plugin. On a Paper server you can limit the number of maces with a plugin, and Modrinth has a few. Do check there’s a version for your Minecraft version. Installing one works as in install plugins on your Minecraft server.