What are incompatible enchantments in Minecraft?

Enchantments are well known in Minecraft and are particularly useful to help give tools, swords, and armor an extra boost in strength and grant other valuable attributes.

Although enchantments are highly useful and even quite critical in some multiplayer game modes, such as Minecraft PvP servers, some enchantments are completely incompatible with each other.

This article will explain exactly what incompatible enchantments in Minecraft are, what enchantments are incompatible with each other, and more.

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Why are enchantments incompatible in Minecraft?

Protection Leggings cannot be enchanted with Blast Protection (Image via Mojang)

Although most enchantments will stack fine with each other, issues can arise with certain enchantment types due to their nature. Essentially, incompatibility normally arises due to the fact it would otherwise break the mechanics of the game or simply be too powerful.

A good example of this in practice is that of the pickaxe, where fortune and silk touch are not allowed to be placed on a single pickaxe. If this was not the case, players would, for example, be able to turn 1 diamond ore into several. They could just repeat this process over and over again, collecting new diamond ores every time and essentially turning 1 ore into an infinite amount.

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What enchantments are incompatible with each other in Minecraft?

Incompatible enchantments cannot be combined using an anvil (Image via Minecraft Wiki)

Enchantments will become incompatible with each other if an item has an enchantment from more than one of the groups mentioned below.

• Tools - Fortune, Silk Touch
• Armor - Protection, Fire Protection, Blast Protection, Projectile Protection
• Sword - Sharpness, Smite, Bane of Arthropods
• Boots - Frost Walker, Depth Strider
• Bow - Infinity, Mending
• Crossbow - Multishot, Piercing
• Trident - Loyalty and Riptide OR Channeling and Riptide
• Mace - Density, Breach, Smite, Bane of Arthropods
• Books - Looting and Silk Touch OR Silk Touch and Luck of the Sea

Players should note that although when playing Minecraft vanilla, these enchantments are indeed incompatible, the same can't be said for when playing on modified Minecraft servers.

There can be special plugins and server-side mods on these servers that allow all types of enchantments to be easily combined without any limits.