Is exploring trial chambers in Minecraft 1.21 worth it?

Trial chambers are the largest and most dangerous addition to Minecraft 1.21, officially known as Tricky Trials. These structures have quickly become the most dangerous in the entire game. As a result, players have been wondering if the loot found within is good enough to justify the potential danger they pose.

That said, the trial chambers that Tricky Trials is partially named after are worth the risks. We look at exactly how many different risks trial chambers pose, as well as the amazing loot they offer players to make up for it.

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Why Minecraft trial chambers are worth exploring, despite their threat

The threats

Hostile mobs wandering around in a trial chamber (Image via Mojang Studios)

Trial chambers are inarguably Minecraft's deadliest combat experience. These structures have the most lethal combination of mobs, traps, and terrain of all the structures in the game.

The mobs found in trial chambers are lethal. You may find any of the following mob spawners:

• Breeze
• Zombies
• Husks
• Spiders
• Slimes
• Silverfish
• Baby Zombies
• Cave Spiders
• Strays
• Skeletons
• Bogged

Of these mobs, a handful make trial chambers scary. These are breeze, husks, baby zombies, cave spiders, strays, skeletons, and bogged. Husks and baby zombies are the simplest and hit hard. Husks also drain hunger, meaning players heal less. Baby zombies have difficult hitboxes to smack due to their speed.

Skeletons, strays, and the bogged also pose a similar threat. Strays are skeleton variants that shoot arrows of slowness, while Minecraft's new bogged mobs are skeleton variants that shoot poisoned arrows. Any skeleton type can be dangerous in large numbers, but being slowed down, poisoned, and shot at, can quickly kill even heavily armored players.

Cave spiders are as deadly as the bogged. Their ability to poison players allows them to deal huge damage, even through Minecraft god armor, dramatically increasing the chances of a player getting killed.

The breeze is the final mob worth mentioning. They spring around, attacking players with wind charges. While these attacks deal little damage, they can send players flying. This poses the risk of activating more trial spawners and can also fling players off of high ledges within the structure, dealing extra damage.

Trial chambers can be made more difficult by entering them with the revamped Minecraft bad omen effect. This will convert them into an ominous trial chamber, a harder variant of the structure with better loot. Needless to say, trial chambers are dangerous. So what loot do they contain to make the risk worth it?

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Regular trial chambers loot

Tridents are by far the best piece of regular vault loot (Image via Mojang Studios)

Regular trial spawners each have a 50% chance of dropping a trial key when defeated. These keys open the Minecraft vaults in trial chambers, where the structure's real loot is found.

This loot includes golden apples, diamonds, emeralds, the bolt Minecraft armor smithing template, guster banner patterns, and enchanted books with some of the game's best enchantments. These enchantments include fortune, silk touch, and mending, to name a few.

However, the best piece of loot available from regular vaults is the trident. This weapon used to be exclusively dropped from drowned mobs, making it challenging to obtain. On the other hand, Vaults can be obtained in a manner that's more fun than swimming around blindly looking for drowned.

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Ominous loot

Ominous vaults are much rarer to make up for their better loot (Image via Mojang Studios)

As mentioned, ominous events and the spawners and vaults they include have even better loot than regular trial chambers. Ominous trial spawners drop better food on average when compared to regular trial spawners. They also drop ominous trial keys instead of regular keys. These keys are used to open the real draw of trial chambers: ominous vaults.

These are versions of vaults with a considerably better pool of loot, which includes rare enchanted Minecraft golden apples, arrows of slowness IV, flow armor trims, blocks of emerald, diamond, and iron, the flow banner pattern, and the music disc for the Creator track.

It also includes the heavy core, which is needed to craft Minecraft's new mace weapon. There's also a chance to get enchanted books with one of the three unique mace enchantments introduced in Tricky Trials. This includes the wind burst enchantment, which can only be obtained from ominous vaults and will never appear in enchanting setups or villager trading halls.