Minecraft has a wide variety of weapons, armor, and other items available for you to use, most of which can be quite helpful to own at different stages of the game. However, most players wouldn't touch these items and enchantments with a ten-foot pickaxe.
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Combat and tools
- Gold items in general, to the point of them being considered a Joke Item for years. Their durability is so fragile and their damage so low that there isn't any conceivable reason to use them over iron tools, which are both more common and more effective, having respectable damage and surprisingly high durability. Gold tools do mine much faster than other tools, even diamond, but their pathetically low durability makes this highly impractical to use. And to add insult to injury, golden pickaxes can't even mine their own ore. Makes sense, since gold in real life is very soft. Fortunately, 1.16 threw golden armour a bone, since it's now advisable to carry at least one piece of golden armour around Piglins so you don't make them angry (though players usually limit it to a pair of boots), and if you want to do a Nether survival challenge, your best chance is to craft tools with the very common Nether golden ore until you either find blackstone or get enough iron nuggets to craft ingots. While the armor is more useful now, though, golden tools are still avoided by most players.
- Leather armour is infamously harder to get than iron armour, which is stronger, more durable and overall better in every conceivable way. You'd need to go out of your way to try to get a full set before crafting iron armor, spending leather that could be put to better use in bookshelves or enchanted books. Its only real advantage is that it can be dyed (Which was actually made less impressive when 1.20 added armour trimming) and the fact that it can protect you from powder snow, which is admitedly annoying to deal with, but hardly excuses carrying leather boots around just in case.
- Chainmail has been the black sheep of the armour family for ages. Despite stone armour existing since at least Ancient China, Notch decided it made more sense to add chainmail armour to the game to occupy the second stage of armour progression. Thing is, while leather armour is crafted with leather, iron armour with iron, golden armour with gold and diamond armour with diamond, chainmail can be crafted with... nothing? For some reason only known to the inner circles of Mojang, it is decided that chainmail armour would be completely uncraftable without cheats, making it impossible to obtain unless you got lucky and either found it in a chest or looted it off a zombie or skeleton, both options being incredibly unlikely. Even then, your chainmail gear would come already damaged, and to repair it, you'd either have to enchant it with Mending (which requires an anvil, which means you already have enough iron to render chainmail obsolete) or try and find another zombie or skeleton wearing it. Unlike gold or leather, which at least found their niches with Piglins or snowier snow, the only bone chainmail armour has received is being able to be sold at full durability by Villagers, although iron is still easier to find and those emeralds could be put to better use too.
- Most tipped arrows just aren't worth it for the amount of effort they require to obtain. In order to craft them from scratch, you have to travel to the End and collect dragon breath, a brewing ingredient to make lingering potions, and then use those potions to craft the arrows. If you don't feel like dealing with the Ender Dragon, your only other option is breeding fletcher Villagers and trading with them until they unlock tipped arrows in their final slot... only for the arrows to end up not being the ones you want, forcing you to either repeat the process ad nauseum or just suck it up and face the dragon anyway. Aside from weakness, poison, slowness, and harmingnote , all the other arrows will only give your enemies a bonus effect that can either be used against you (congratulations, that Ravager now has eight minutes of Invisibility) or just won't do anything (why would you give Night Vision to a zombie, when they don't need light to see you?). At least health arrows can be a tad more useful than regular arrows against the Wither.
- Tridents are Awesome, but Impractical, with a major emphasis on the impractical side. For starters, they're unimaginably rare to get: Drowned might spawn with one and have a measly chance to drop it after death, and it'll surely be very damaged and need to be repaired with either a Mending book or another trident. They can't be enchanted with the really useful enchantments like Sharpness or Looting, instead having their own (in relation to combat) mediocre pool of enchantments. While it is cool that they can be both wielded melee and at distance, it's better to just carry a sword and bow with their own enchantments if you want options for both close-quarters and ranged combat, instead of using one weapon that's mediocre at both. The only real niche they have is Ocean Monument raiding, since their capacity for being thrown underwater and access to Impaling means they can get through Guardians and Elder Guardians with ease. This label however only applies to the trident's offensives capabilities, as the utility capabilities of the trident are a separate case (where the trident has far more positives).
- Clocks are supposed to have the niche of being able to tell you the time when you're underground, so you can get out at daytime when there are fewer hostile mobs, but that's a niche so immeasurably small that no sane player has ever carried a clock with them unless they just bought it or found it in a chest. It's also pretty easy to calculate the time through watching the sun or moon, meaning that clocks usually tend to get relegated to wall decoration.
Potions
- Jump Boost is the Useless Useful Spell of status effects. To brew a Potion of Leaping, you need to get a quite rare rabbit's foot, but you'd be better off using that rabbit's foot as a lucky charm, since Jump Boost I only makes you able to jump half a block higher — only enough to get over fences, which might be impressive in the Olympics, but is next to useless in an average Minecraft world. Jump Boost II is slightly better, since you can now jump two blocks, which makes climbing mountains easier if you don't have a bucket of water in hand, but don't waste your time trying to find someone who has a leaping potion in hand but not a water bucket.
- Invisibility is the most Awesome, but Impractical effect of them all. Don't get it backwards, being the Martian Manhunter is cool, but to properly use the potion you'll have to remove your armour, leaving you more exposed to damage, and if you get close enough to a mob they'll still be able to sense you. And don't try using it in multiplayer either: you'll be emanating more particles than a nuclear reactor, which will surely do wonders for your stealth.
Enchantments
- Bane of Arthropods is universally considered by far the worst enchantment to put on a sword. It causes your weapon to deal greatly increased damage to arthropods and apply Slowness IV on hit. Of the arthropods the game has to offer, Spiders are an easy beginner enemy; Cave Spiders are only found in abandoned mineshafts; Silverfish are rare; Endermites are even rarer; and Bees are neutral to the player, and better left alive. All of these mobs also have quite low HP, so the extra damage compared to Sharpness won't mean much of anything. As a result, Bane of Arthropods is the embodiment of Crippling Overspecialization, and players will always pass it over for either the universal damage boost of Sharpness, or the more useful specialization of Smite.
- While Fortune on a pickaxe is a must have and Fortune on a shovel can have its moments, particularly with clay and flint, Fortune on an axe or a hoe is a waste of a perfectly good enchantment:
- The axe has exactly one use for fortune: it will increase the amount of melon slices dropped by a melon block. Y'know, melon slices, also known as one of the most useless food sources on the game. Unless you need tons of healing potions, melon farming is usually done with pistons or Silk Touch to ensure they can be sold to farmers, so a Fortune axe is going in exactly the wrong direction.
- The hoe has a similar effect but at least has a bit of an advantage. Aside of being able to obtain more sweet berries, another near-useless food source, it at least has the decency to also collect more Nether wart, a key ingredient in brewing. Even so, though, Nether wart is easy to grow in massive quantities once you have one and a block of soul sand, so a Fortune hoe has very little advantage over a regular one. A Fortune/Efficiency hoe is also a woodcutter's friend as it can quickly destroy a huge amount of leaves while increasing the number of saplings you get.
- Nearly all trident enchantments are this, except for Loyalty:
- Impaling will do more damage to aquatic mobs. This means that unless you're a psycho who gets your kicks out of killing dolphins/axolotls or you somehow don't have access to a stone axe to One-Hit Kill a salmon, it's only good to kill Guardians and Elder Guardians, who are only found on ocean monuments so you aren't going to battle them constantly. It also doesn't work on Drowned, which are classified as undead and not aquatic. Fortunately, Bedrock Edition gave Impaling a useful Balance Buff: there, it deals extra damage to any mob in the water, not just aquatic ones, so a trident with Impaling can be a powerful weapon if you lure your foes into the water or carry a water bucket.
- Channeling summons a lightning bolt that burns your opponent during thunderstorms. Cool, huh? Except that thunderstorms are pretty rare, so when it's not storming, your trident may as well not be enchanted. Also, the rain in storms will put out the fire from the bolt, and if a mob moves quick enough, the lightning can miss. If you shoot a mob too close to yourself, by the way, you'll probably get electrocuted too. Oh, and you may accidentally create a charged creeper. It's much safer to just not play with electricity. About their only legitimate use is to charge creepers in a controlled environment, so you can make them explode and cause mobs to drop their heads — but even then, mob heads are purely cosmetic, save those of Wither Skeletons, which don't need this setup to get their skulls.
- Riptide makes your trident unable to be used as a ranged weapon, already removing the main thing a trident has going for it. In exchange, contact with water will let you launch yourself through the air like a projectile. This, as you can imagine, is incredibly dangerous. While you will damage your enemies by ramming them, you may just miss and get near them and expose yourself to them, or be thrown off a cliff. If you try to use it as a means of transportation, keep in mind that you have no protection from fall damage, and since the trident needs a bit to charge up, you'll need the precision of a surgeon to connect it properly and not fall to your death. It gets slightly more practical once you have access to Elytra, though, since you can launch yourself in the air from the water without using fireworks, but good luck using it outside the water when there's no rain around.
