- Mace is a powerful new melee weapon you can craft using a breeze rod and heavy core in Minecraft 1.21.
- This weapon has a unique property as it deals more damage, the longer you fall. Mace negates fall damage and knocks back entities.
- You can enchant the mace with several great enchantments and also repair it in a few ways.
If you’re tired of using the default sword or an axe as your primary weapon of choice in Minecraft, you’ve come to the right place. The Minecraft 1.21 update is bringing a powerful new weapon to the game called the mace. This guide will teach you how to make a mace, the exciting and powerful new melee weapon that lets you even one-shot the Warden in Minecraft. So, if you’re ready, let’s begin!
Resources Required to Make a Mace
To make a mace in Minecraft 1.21, you’ll need some very unique and difficult-to-get items. Those are:
- 1 Breeze rod
- 1 Heavy core
These two items are only available in the trial chambers. The breeze rod is, as you might expect, a drop from the Breeze mob. By default, you’ll get up to 2 Breeze rods per kill, but with the looting enchantment, you might get up to 8 Breeze rods for a single Breeze kill.
The heavy core is one of the reward items you can get from the ominous vault block. Unfortunately, this is the item you’ll spend most time looking for as there is only about a 8.3% chance of it being ejected from. To learn more on how to unlock the ominous vault, check out the linked guide above and our guide on ominous trials.
So, if you’re not lucky, you’ll probably need to find two, three, or even more different trial chambers to find a single heavy core item. And since this structure generation is a bit rare, you’ll definitely need to get an explorer map to find trial chambers and obtain the heavy core. Surprisingly, the crafting table is not necessary to make a mace, but you can still use it if you want.
How to Craft a Mace in Minecraft 1.21
After you finally find the heavy core after fighting mobs in a plethora of trial chambers, it’s time you make the mace. Follow the steps below for the mace crafting recipe:
- Open your inventory with the E key or use a crafting table to get started.
- Place the breeze rod in any of the two bottom slots of the crafting grid.
- Then, add the heavy core above the breeze rod.
- The mace will appear in the result slot on the right.
Besides the inventory crafting grid and the crafting table, you can also use a crafter to automatically mass-produce maces if you’ve got the resources.
How to Use a Mace in Minecraft 1.21
You can use a mace just like any other melee weapon. Get close to a target and press the left mouse button to attack. Jumping and attacking will cause you to perform a critical hit, which will increase the damage the mace deals.
Now, if you think we were joking initially, we were not. It’s actually possible to kill the Warden with only one swing of the mace. For that, we first need to understand the mace’s damage stats:
Weapon Stats
The base mace stats are 6 attack damage (3 hearts) and 0.5 attack speed on the Java edition. The attack damage is the same for the Bedrock edition and attack speed doesn’t exist currently, so you can spam-attack without any cooldown. The mace’s damage on a critical hit is 9 (4.5 hearts) on both editions.
However, the area where mace shines is the increased damage when jumping from a height. When you jump from a height greater than 1.5 blocks, the mace’s damage will increase. First three blocks you fall, mace will accumulate four attack points or two hearts for each block. For the next five blocks fallen, the mace will receive a boost of two attack points or one heart for each block. Every single block after that will add half a heart of damage to the mace.
So, if you fall for 3 blocks, the maces damage will increase by 4 for all three blocks, so that’s 12. And since you landed from a height, the mace will deal critical damage or 9 damage points, so you can deal a total of 21 points of damage approximately. That is about 10 hearts. So, this little attack could one-shot zombies, husks and skeletons very easily.
The calculation may not be completely accurate, but it’s quite close. So, if you jump from a 10-block high platform and hit a target successfully, your mace will deal damage of around 40-45, which translates to about 22 hearts.
Because of this, the new weapons – mace and wind charges – are the perfect combination. You can hold the wind charges in your off-hand in Java edition and use them to launch yourself in the air. Then, just before you land, hit an enemy with the mace, and you’ll deal extra damage and not take any fall damage yourself. See this in action as I jump kill a Warden with the mace:
The mace’s possible damage is not capped, so it can basically be infinite. This is why it’s possible to kill the Warden with just one shot. Though, this is not very easy, as you’ll have to jump from a really great height of well over 200 blocks.
If you’re wondering why anyone would fall from such a high place if they’re just going to die from fall damage, then we’ve got good news for you. If you successfully land a hit on your target, all fall damage will be negated, no matter how long you’ve been falling. Yeah, that’s right. If you’re good with your hit, you can avoid fall damage completely. Though, this is not at all easy to do.
In addition to all of that, you will also perform a smash attack like the Hulk, one of the strongest Avengers in the MCU. This AOE attack will knock back entities in the area around the player, which makes the mace super satisfying to use. The mace also has a durability of 500 that will decrease by 1 every time you hit something.
Mace Enchantments
Mace can be enchanted with a total of 8 enchantments. Those are:
- Unbreaking
- Mending
- Smite
- Bane of arthropods
- Density
- Breach
- Wind burst
- Curse of vanishing
However, not all enchantments can go on the same mace. Smite, bane of arthropods, density and breach are all mutually exclusive, so they cannot be combined together. It means you may only choose one of these four enchantments to go on your mace.
The best option is probably density if you’re planning on fighting regular mobs and not armored players. To learn what all of these enchantments do, feel free to check out our guides on best mace enchantments and all Minecraft enchantments.
Repairing Mace
If you are fighting with the mace at night or killing mobs in trial chambers, you can repair a mace in three ways:
- By combining two damaged maces in an anvil, crafting grid or grindstone;
- By combining a damaged mace with breeze rods in the anvil;
- By obtaining XP while holding a mending-enchanted mace.
Similarly to other items in Minecraft, you may repair a damaged mace with another damaged mace. The durability of the two weapons will get added and on top of that the newly made mace will get a 5% durability increase. All three utility blocks provide the same repairing advantages, but the anvil will require some XP levels.
However, this method requires two maces and yields one mace at the end, which is not worth it. The second method is therefore much better. You will need to combine the mace in the first slot and the breeze rods in the second slot of the anvil. This will cost some XP levels, but one rod will restore 25% of the mace’s durability.
Though, by far the best method of repairing a mace is with the mending enchantment. It will restore the weapon’s durability when the player collects XP orbs. Visit our linked guide on how to get mending in Minecraft to keep your mace permanently.
There you have it, everyone. Now you know how to get a mace and how it works. A long time has passed until we finally received a new weapon in Minecraft and it’s absolutely amazing. With that said, do you also love the mace? Share with us in the comments below!