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I'm a stand-up comic by night and write for HGG by day. Most of my gaming happens at an improvised desk at the Days Inn right outside whatever small town I'm in for the night.
Getting ahold of a good helmet is an essential priority for any Minecraft player. Maybe you want to explore the deeper, more difficult sections of the game, like the mysterious underwater temples and flooded caves. Once you have an enchanting table, it’s a good idea to place an enchantment on your iron, diamond, or netherite helmet. We’ve made a list of the nine best helmet enchantments in Minecraft to help you know which enchantments are right for you.
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9 Best Helmet Enchantments in Minecraft
With all the options available, how do you pick the best helmet enchantment for your needs? Let’s break it down.
1. Blast Protection
Blast protection is a decent option for dealing with the dreaded creeper. With a full suit of armor all enchanted with blast protection, you can withstand a sneak attack from a creeper without being obliterated. You’ll also have an easier time fighting ghasts — ghost-like, floating mobs that inhabit the Nether.
While it’s a decent option for your helmet, Blast Protection is mutually exclusive with the other forms of protection listed below, so you need to be picky about which kind you take.
You can obtain Blast Protection at the enchanting table, or find it in books up to Level IV.
2. Protection
The normal Protection enchantment is an easy-to-find mainstay of every player’s first few sets of armor. It provides a general decrease in damage from all sources, at the expense of less damage reduction from specific sources. It’s not unusual to make at least four sets of enchanted armor so you can take advantage of all four kinds of protection!
It’s a great pick for a helmet, as they take the second-least amount of resources to make. That being said, most players will want this enchantment on their absolute best helmet, like the first one you’re able to turn to netherite.
This enchantment is commonly available up to Level IV on the enchantment table. You can also find it by trading with villagers or looting buildings for enchanted books.
3. Projectile Protection
Projectile Protection gives you resistance to almost every form of ranged damage. This includes arrows shot from bows and crossbows, thrown tridents, blaze fireballs, and even impact damage from the fireballs that the ghast or the wither fling your direction.
Projectile Protection is also important for PVP situations, or certain biomes that contain lots of projectile-wielding opponents, like a soul sand desert full of skeletons in the nether. It’s also a good pick to wear during one of the Pillager raids, helping you withstand mass crossbow fire. Keep in mind that you can mitigate all of these with a shield, so Projectile Protection doesn’t need to be a high priority for your helmet.
Like the other protection enchantments, it’s mutually exclusive with any alternate version of protection. It’s only worth getting once you already have a decent helmet with the regular Protection enchantment applied.
4. Fire Protection
The last of the protection enchantments is likely the one you will need to use the least. Initially, it can seem like a good choice for certain parts of the Nether, as it helps you take less damage from lava and fireballs. However, you’ll quickly acquire fire resistance potions after bringing down just a few blazes, so we don’t recommend taking this enchantment unless you’re looking to do some wild projects with big forests and some flint.
It’s also worth noting there are four great alternatives for getting through a big pool of lava. You can either wear a full suit of netherite armor, drink a fire resistance potion, or tame and mount a strider in the Nether. Fire protection is exclusive against the other protection enchantments, but blending a few pieces into a suit of armor can be very helpful.
5. Mending
Mending is consistently one of the best enchantments in Minecraft. 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. Putting mending on a helmet that already has Aqua Affinity and Respiration is a great plan for keeping your best gear in tip-top shape.
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 comes with a 1% chance of including Mending as a side enchantment.
6. Unbreaking
Unbreaking is a very common enchantment across many classes of items. Rather than providing your items with extra durability, Unbreaking gives armor or tools a chance to not take damage when they are supposed to. Getting a high level of Unbreaking on your helmet is almost as useful as having the rare Mending enchantment in terms of how long it will help you keep your good gear active.
It’s easiest to get the Unbreaking enchantment at the enchanting table, being that it’s one of the most common enchantments to appear for armor items.
7. Thorns
Thorns is a useful enchantment for heavy fighting against lots of opponents. When you wear armor enchanted with Thorns, any enemy that attacks you has a chance of taking damage themselves, complete with a knockback effect. The more pieces of armor you wear with the Thorns enchantment applied, the higher your chances are of doing more damage.
The downside to Thorns, and the reason you may not want it for your helmet, is that it does small amounts of damage to the durability of the item itself whenever the thorns effect is activated. Pairing Thorns with a higher level of the Unbreaking enchantment can mitigate this extra durability damage.
8. Respiration
The Respiration enchantment allows you to breathe underwater for a total of fifteen seconds per level of enchantment, up to a maximum of Level III. Level III Respiration allows for a total breath time of sixty seconds when you include the fifteen seconds you usually get underwater.
This can be invaluable in deep caves, many of which are full of water that hides valuable resources like diamonds. You can also use it to explore water temples and shipwrecks for loot. When the game determines the location of valuable resources like diamonds, it generates them based on how much air exposure any given block has. This means you’re much more likely to find diamonds inside a watery cave, rather than one you can easily breathe in.
Respiration is exclusive to helmets, making it one of the best enchantments you can put on your helmet. It becomes obsolete to a degree when you obtain a potion brewing station and water-breathing potions, but still functions as a decent backup in case you’re deep inside a water temple when your potion wears off.
For added effectiveness, put respiration on a turtle shell helmet. The turtle shell helmet all on its own adds another ten seconds of breath, giving you seventy total seconds underwater if you need it. Shipwrecks won’t stop you now!
9. Aqua Affinity
Aqua Affinity is one of the best helmet enchantments in Minecraft, as it’s exclusive to helmets and incredibly useful in solving some late-game problems. It only has a single level of enchantment, but that single level allows you to mine and move at an average speed while submerged in water.
If you’ve ever tried to mine underwater, you know it can be a real pain. Usually, when your head is submerged, you can only mine blocks at 20% of the normal speed. Floating in water is even harsher, with your mining speed usually cut back to be 25x slower than usual. Aqua Affinity can help you collect many more resources, bringing your mining speed back to 100% efficiency.
It’s best paired with the Respiration enchantment on a turtle shell helmet as well.
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