On Minecraft Combat
Minecraft combat these days is weird. We have swords, shields, tridents, bows and crossbows. There’s also things like splash potions and snowballs, as well as TNT and End Crystals. And these days, you can use an axe as efficiently as you can use a sword, depending on if you prefer fast damage or slow damage. Depending on what platform you’re on though, because Java and Bedrock Edition both treat axes differently.
Combat wasn’t always like this though. For a long time, combat in Minecraft consisted mostly of using a sword and swinging it as fast as you can. Damage is based on the quality of the sword – a diamond sword will do much more damage than a stone sword, but even a wooden sword is better than just punching. The maximum speed was dictated by a server’s tick speed, but your connection to a server also affected how much you could swing. Then again, what multiplayer game DOESN’T rely on server connection to dictate your damage? However, later on, a bit more nuance was added to sword swinging. If you hit someone while jumping, you’d do a crit, thus doing extra damage. Being in the air in general means you do extra damage, so you need to be careful if someone is jumping at you. Although sword combat has changed over the years, the critical damage has not.
Speaking of sword combat, you can no longer just swing a sword. Well, you can spam your swings, but it does far less damage. Hitting something has a bit of a cooldown, and you do maximum damage if you wait for that cooldown to wear off. Swords cool down twice as fast as axes, but axes do more damage on Java Edition, and they can also disable shields. Swords on the other hand are capable of sweeping attacks that knock enemies back, if you are not sprinting. On Bedrock Edition, axes do less damage and have the same cooldown as a sword. They also don’t disable shields like they do in Java Edition. Why? Who knows? We also used to be able to block with swords. This functionality was removed and given to shields, which can be dual-wielded with a sword. While blocking with a sword didn’t reduce durability, blocking with a shield does, but it blocks a lot more damage.
As for other types of damage, for a long time, it was only bows that could do ranged damage, but over the years, more things have been added. You can throw snowballs and eggs, in order to knock enemies back, but they don’t do any damage. These days though, you can get a lovely Crossbow, which does more damage for, you guessed it, a longer charge time. However, you get slowed down more than a bow, and can’t fire it until it’s fully charged. Crossbows are also slightly more accurate and shoot slightly further. I still prefer a bow though, because sometimes you don’t want a fully charged shot.
Tridents are better than swords and axes and bows, but they’re also super rare. You can throw tridents and, with the enchantment Loyalty, it can magically come back to you.
And then there’s explosions. TNT is the classic choice, but when it comes to combat, it’s actually not the best choice. TNT takes time to prime. But if you are in the Nether or the End, the best choice of explosive is the humble bed. Beds explode if you try to sleep in them while not in the normal world, and using a bed is the strategy when speedrunning Minecraft and killing the Ender Dragon. Ender Crystals used to be even better, but they are expensive to make, and you can now only place them on obsidian and bedrock.
But despite so many years of Minecraft, the sword is still the classic, most reliable damage tool. Easy to get, easy to use. And, honestly, that’s a good thing. Swords are cool.