Unlocking Silk Touch: A Guide for Minecraft Players

Are you a Minecraft enthusiast looking to enhance your gameplay with the Silk Touch enchantment?

In this article, we will explore everything you need to know about Silk Touch in Minecraft.

Learn how to obtain this valuable enchantment through enchanting tools, trading with villagers, or finding enchanted books, and discover the various items on which Silk Touch can be applied.

Discover the benefits of Silk Touch, such as collecting blocks without breaking them, preserving valuable resources, and creating decorative blocks.

Stay tuned to learn how to effectively use Silk Touch in your Minecraft adventures!

What Is Silk Touch in Minecraft?

In the Minecraft world, Silk Touch is an enchanting and resource-gathering skill that allows breaking blocks to drop themselves directly, particularly when they would normally drop something else. An example of this is that a silk touched pickaxe on iron or gold ore will drop the ore block as is, while a non-silk touched pickaxe will drop as ingots. Silk touched pickaxes are needed for delicate operations when blocks must be moved itself to move the delicate blocks for glue walls, or lights.

Figuring out how to get silk touch in Minecraft is a matter of preference. To obtain silk touch items during gameplay the player must make use of the enchantment tables, anvil, or blacksmith and use the available XP (Experience Points) they have to upgrade their ordinary pickaxes, shovels, and axes to ones that have the Silk Touch enchantment. These pickaxes, axes, and shovels are deemed Silk Touch pickaxes, Silk Touch shovels, and Silk Touch axes, to signify the particular skill attached to the item.

A Silk Touch pickaxe is used to gather delicate blocks like glass without it breaking. These items can be found in plains grass blocks or other stained-glass texture. Silk Touch pickaxe in minecraft store wood blocks directly (not wood byproducts like wood logs or wood planks) among other uses.

How to Obtain Silk Touch?

You can obtain Silk Touch by using different methods to enchant tools, books, and weapons. Silk Touch is found from certain Tier 1 enchantments and all Tier 2 through Tier 5 enchantments that you can place on various tools and items.

To get Silk Touch, you need to directly obtain it from any of the following sources (or use an anvil, grindstone, or Smithing Table to apply them to the desired item):

1. Enchanting table: Spend 15 levels to enchant a tool in the table and receive a random enchant. You can simply place iron, gold, or diamond tools you’ve crafted in a pattern of 2 of the same tools together with 11 bookshelves surrounding the table. You may have to reroll your item dozens of times before you get the desired enchantment.
2. Craft with Sculk Sensor: Sculk Sensors allow for enchanted wireless and wired communication, adding another feature to wireless redstone systems. Sculk or Wireless Redstone ore is found in the top three levels of the world.
3. Find on a Tablet: This feature is not available in the current version of Minecraft.
4. Trade at a villager: As of this writing, none of the trades of the existing villagers includes acquisition of silk touch.
5. Zombie Piglins’ loot: Similar to other loots in the Nether or when using the looting enchantment, you can get Silk Touch directly from a Zombie Piglin.

Enchanting a Tool with Silk Touch

The primary way to obtain Silk Touch in Minecraft is to enchant a tool using an enchantment table or an upgraded grindstone with a book that has Silk Touch as one of three random enchantments. To maximize the chance of getting Silk Touch via an enchantment table, players need a bookshelf setup that provides 15 bookshelves worth of enchanting points. This creates the best odds (2.34%) for getting Silk Touch, as opposed to an advanced grindstone (14.8%) or lower bookshelves (only a 0.2% chance from one bookshelf).

To enchant a tool or book with a grindstone, Silk Touch must be one of the current item’s three enchantments. If not, enchant another item and place it against the enchanted one on the right-hand side of the interface so that it retains the original enchantment levels. Rinse and repeat until a silk touch book is created.

Trading with Villagers

Trading with villagers is another way to get the Silk Touch enchantment. To acquire Silk Touch from librarians or cartographers, level them up during the day and attempt to trade with them until they offer an enchanted book with Silk Touch. Patience is necessary if the player is seeking Silk Touch through this method because they may need to break the trades they make repeatedly. Each time they do not get the enchanted book they seek and try again later hoping for the trade to cycle. Trading with Villagers is also a totally separate area of its own in terms of a general path to enchantment. Please see the general trading guidelines above for a more detailed explanation of that process.

Finding Silk Touch Enchanted Books

Silk Touch enchanted books can be found by bartering with Piglins. Leatherworker villagers may sell enchanted books for 15-64 emeralds. Players can find Chorus Plants in the End and feed it to a live Parrot. The parrot will periodically drop some as it sits on a player’s shoulder, which the player can then pick up. The parrot must be sitting on a player’s shoulder or the chorus plant will not drop as it gets consumed and will not grow if it gets hit by particles, projectiles, or water. Enchanted books may also be found in dungeons, mineshafts, desert temples, village temples, strongholds, and end cities. Enchanted books are not usually naturally generated with silk touch. Most are found by fishing, but can also be traded with librarians for the price of up to 64 emeralds.

What Items Can Silk Touch Be Applied To?

Silk Touch can be applied to tools, weapons, and armor such as axes, pickaxes, hoes, shovels, swords, and helmets. In addition, it can be applied to the following non-combat, non-tool in-game items. They can be useful in acquiring certain blocks such as grass, ore blocks (be it coal, iron, diamond, …), and other blocks which can be obtained only when using a pickaxe with Silk Touch.

1. Books – best for enchanting with Silk Touch
2. Enchanted Books – good to apply the Silk Touch enchantment to a specific item
3. Bottles of Enchanting – get the player experience with Silk Touch for use with enchanting
4. Snapshot Screen – Allows players to prevent the destruction of slime blocks in 1.8.89 and prior versions

Useful, but not essential items that can have Silk Touch applied to them are as follows:

• Banners – Decoration items mostly used to prevent creepers from blowing up players. Not very directly beneficial
• Signs – Useful for identifying pathways, especially for servers but are more of an ancillary decoration element

Stone and Ore Blocks

Silk touch is used to collect stone and ore blocks that drop themselves when broken. Every non-ore block that needs a specific tool or has a drop smaller than itself does not drop itself using silk touch. This mainly includes glass and ice blocks but applies to other blocks as well.

Examples of stone, ore, and other material blocks that drop themselves with silk touch are listed in the table below.

Mineable block types from video game ‘Minecraft’ that drop themselves using silk touch

Block	Description Example
Stone	Generics
Diorite	Generics
Andesite	Generics
Cobblestone	Generics
Gravel	Generics
Grass Block	Generics
Dirt	Includes coarse
Podzol	Includes mycelium
Clay	Generics
Red Sand	Generics
Ice	When breaking
Snow	Top layer
Glowstone	Once broken

Glass

Glass in Minecraft is made by smelting sand or red sand blocks. Touching regular glass drops it as a block into your inventory. Glass blocks can become panes of glass if smelted again in a furnace.

If glass is dropped with an item that has the silk touch enchantment, the glass can be picked back up as a block instead of dropping into item form. This means that it can be reused immediately without having to wait for the glass block to naturally break or manually break it after picking it up. This makes it ideal for using at construction sites, in furniture, and more, as it can provide a barrier without permanently altering landscapes or buildings.

Spawning glass (as seen in recent versions of Minecraft when glass is thrown in the Nether or End, and it has a smooth stone variant with very low visibility) is a practical and fun building block and safety barrier for places that you do not want monsters spawning.

Silk Touch Mining in Minecraft earlier versions (such as the Detailed Stone Models 1.13 minecraft mod, which allows the player to keep detailed stone versions that were expected to drop, in order to have more control over the appearance of cobblestone terrain) is useful for construction where you want a fine level of control over the size and placement of stone and other blocks.

Ice and Packed Ice

Ice can be added to the list of blocks optically affected by Silk Touch, as using a bucket on water in a Cold Taiga where temperatures are below -0.2 degrees Celsius is used to create ice blocks which can be collected without Silk Touch (although adding Silk Touch makes the collection easier).

Using Silk Touch on Ice blocks lets you keep them in your inventory and elsewhere without melting. You can then convert them into Packed Ice blocks by crafting or using a Frost Walker enchanted book as placing Ice blocks against a solid block is most often removed by Solid Touch. Solid Touch is removed by Silk Touch, still allowing a Silk Touch player to remove Ice without Water as intended by Solid Touch.

Leaves and Grass

Silk Touch cannot directly be obtained from leaves or grass in Minecraft, but leaf blocks drop a block of steady wax when Silk Touch is used.

The only way to acquire Silk Touch in bedrock edition without using cheats is to trade for it at the relevant level with a librarian villager if Silk Touch can be found amid its item pool or from the daily wander discounts that go up to -75%. Silk Touch books can be traded for at the Journeyman level which requires the placement of a lectern to ensure the desired profession landlord trader is not replaced by a more palatable one.

No special expertise is required. To trade for Silk Touch at the Master level (a 20% chance) the librarian must be locked in to the desired trade options using a name tag or they may change. Villagers can be placed near a lectern to give them the librarian occupation if needed. Journeyman and Master librarians can be distinguished from other librarian levels by whether they are wearing glasses.

40 total emeralds and 3 books will get you everything needed to make an inevitable or efficient system from a cartography table. Dispatch 14 librarians to death until one brings you a Silk Touch book.

Bookshelves and Ender Chests

Breaking a bookshelf block with a pickaxe may drop itself as an item if a silk touch tool is used. To craft a bookshelf block to break and test is simple. 9 wooden planks plus 6 wooden slabs will make your item.

Ender chests in Minecraft are similar. One of the few utility blocks that allows itself to be picked up by a pickaxe enchanted with silk touch. Breaking an ender chest with anything other than a silk touch pickaxe will yield nothing and destroy the block.

The Ender chest is useful because it retains its contents when broken and can be placed elsewhere and retain access to its contents. Silk touch is ideal for picking up an ender chest and moving all items inward. This way you do not need to worry about combining two chests, and it won’t drop all of its items when relocated.

A pickaxe for mining bookshelves or the ender chest, as well as for mining ores, can be matched with other uses for enchantments, such as Fortune to increase ore drops or Unbreaking to make the tool itself more durable.

Spawners

Users can approach food, plant, or water animal spawners to acquire silk touch. To achieve a silk touch enchantment players utilize books or enchanting tables in enchanting some tools. Craft a book by wrapping 3 pieces of paper plus 1 leather using the 2×2 or 3×3 crafting grid. Any level enchantment up to silk touch can be obtained on the book and a tool of choice by using an enchanting table. Expanding books in crafting is done by wrapping one enchanted book with additional books at a crafting grid of 2×2 or greater. Pickaxe, shovel, axe, hoe, shears, sword, pickaxe, or bow are typically used. Silkworms to obtain a silk touch enchantment on a shears (preferred) or sword must be used because they appear to be the only tool or weapon capable of taming and using various types of moth species as silk providers.

What Are the Benefits of Silk Touch?

The benefits of Silk Touch in Minecraft are that it allows players to obtain certain blocks that do not otherwise drop as a block, and it allows the collection of ice and packed ice rather than going through the process of forming them.

There are currently 36 exceptions to the ability to retrieve blocks that players have mined using Silk Touch since they only drop raw materials. These include items that players who have Silk Touch might want, such as diamonds, coal ore, and iron ore. The Nether may be mined with an iron pickaxe with the Silk Touch enchantment to allow collection of Netherrack, Nether Quartz ore, and blocks such as Nether Brick, Red Nether Brick, Nether Wart Block and End Stone most blocks. Even Waterlogged Blocks, Monster Spawners, Bee Nests, Honeycombs, and Infested Blocks are blocks that players can only find or create, but not pick up in Survival mode, can be obtained.

Using a pickaxe with the Silk Touch pickaxe avoids the risk of Creepers and explosions, the necessity of clearing the area, etc. which are some benefits. In the case of Ice, a block that is destroyed in contact with anything but Silk Touch or an entity’s head will convert into a water source, making it unobtainable itself.

Collecting Blocks Without Breaking Them

The Silk Touch enchantment in Minecraft has a single ability, which is to drop the block type the player is breaking even if it is not normally obtainable. Specifically, it accomplishes dropping stone when mining monster spawners and end portal frames without consuming these blocks. It and only it is unique among all enchantments in allowing normal blocks like grass, ice, diamond ore, or others to be dropped and collected as normal if desired, rather than drop what they convert into.

Preserving Valuable Blocks

Silk touch is the best enchantment to keep specific types of blocks whole and unaltered as when broken. This includes glass (being clear as an example), glowstone (furnace fuel and ambient luminescence) and bee nests (keeps bees and makable honeycomb alive). To give a more practical application to these examples:

1. Glass: Glass is used in enchanting tables, decorative windows inside homes, and smelting stations. Silk touch glass blocks up to obtain them for specific projects.
2. Glowstone: By using a silktouch pickaxe, a player can obtain glowstone blocks as they are naturally found in the Nether. Without silk touch, glowstone blocks can only be obtained by breaking them into glowstone dust, at which point they cannot be recombined.
3. Bee nests: Finding more bee nests is arduous, so using a silktouch tool to transport them into one’s preferred environment is recommended.

Using silk touch reduces the number of blocks accidentally lost, with coal ore, lapis lazuli ore, nether gold ore, netherite block, and redstone ore 5 materials having the greatest likelihood of being unintentionally broken back into their regular post-mining residual forms while mining.

Creating Decorative Blocks

Silk Touch is used on decorative blocks to ensure the time-consuming process of creating the blocks is efficient and to preserve the original block and its inherent value (such as glass). Diamonds, emeralds, Sea Lanters, and valuable or luminescent ores are examples of decorative blocks that Silk Touch affects. The player gets a higher ROI when the decorative blocks are smelted, as after Silk Touch is used, they can then place the block and use a different tool (such as a pickaxe or shovel) to break it, letting them keep the decorative, undamaged version of the block in storage.

Sea Latern: Is only available in the Underwater Ruins at the bottom of the ocean. It drops as a block when mined with Silk Touch. Otherwise it drops as prismarine crystals. Glowstone: Found in clusters in the Nether Fortresses, waiting to be mined with Silk Touch. Drops 2-4 pieces of Glowstone Dust otherwise. Dragon Egg: After defeating the Ender Dragon and putting the pedestal atop the fountain, use any bedrock destroying mechanism (most commonly in the Java edition pistons) to move the Egg to a better collection location. The dragon egg will automatically be dropped when mined using a pickaxe enchanted with silk touch (or even touch itself).

How to Use Silk Touch Effectively?

Silk Touch is used effectively in Minecraft when acquiring or transporting blocks, items, or entities which are normally lost or transformed when touched by other tools. These include the following.

• Grass: Used to transport full grass blocks.
• Ice: Used to move full water blocks or make rapid water slides.
• Mob spawners: Used for any practical purposes you may have, such as moving a farm spawner further into your base.
• End Portal: Used for building a new teleportation system to the End more easily.
• Nether Ores: Used to transport entire precious ore deposits.
• Enchantment Table: As it isn’t destroyed and is portable in survival mode.
• Glow Lichen: Accessible and portable light source.

Use Silk Touch for Mining Valuable Blocks

Silk Touch in Minecraft is most frequently used on valuable blocks to maximize collection efficiency when mining various ores. Some of the most popular blocks that are most efficiently collected with Silk Touch include:

• Diamond Ore: Allows you to mine diamond blocks directly rather than risking loss of some diamonds as items or by destroying them entirely.
• Cobwebs, Clays, and Mycelium Blocks: Can be utilized if the player requires them often.
• Bookshelf: To allow you to move it to places where it is required, such as enchanting rooms.
• Pack Ice: To allow blocks of ice in ice farms to be mined for water reclamation.
• Sea Lanterns: Used for decorating.
• End Portal Frame: To allow use as a stand-alone teleporter.
• Glow Lichen: To collect and use as a light source, although more could be generated via bone-mealing moss blocks.
• Moss Block: Used for tree farms and ground-cover.
• Spawner: To recover and relocate it.

Remember that these purposes only necessitate the use of Silk Touch. However, blocks which are not coming from ore can be simply duplicated via Creative Mode, with the exception of spawners and the end portal frame, so it is somewhat inefficient to utilize Silk Touch for materials not sourced from ores.

Use Silk Touch for Building and Decoration

Silk Touch can be used to collect glass, leaves, mushrooms, sea pickles, bamboo, beehives, and more. This means that you can use Silk Touch on glass blocks to gather them for use at a later date, without any changes to their appearance. Once smelted glass blocks will lose their tinted or tinted top color.

You can use Silk Touch for leaves to take them home for decorating without them coming out of position or turning into a warped block.

Combine Silk Touch with Other Enchantments

You do not need an enchantment table to obtain Silk Touch in Minecraft. You can get it after obtaining a Silk Touch book that you combine in an anvil with another item. This is how you combine Silk Touch and other enchantments to produce the item. The target item is placed on the left, the Silk Touch book is placed on the right. Combining Silk Touch with a single enchantment provides an 80% success rate. Combining Silk Touch with a different item, mending for example, offers a 4.55% of being successful, meaning a massive number of attempts are needed in order to find the right enchantment as seen in a screenshot of the desktop version. The item you are combining is repairable. If you anticipate burning through many spare items, this will help. You will need at least as much XP as your enchantment cost in order to combine.

Frequently Asked Questions

How to Get Silk Touch in Minecraft?

1. What is Silk Touch in Minecraft?

Silk Touch is an enchantment in Minecraft that allows players to collect blocks without breaking them. This is useful for preserving blocks like ice, glass, and bookshelves.

2. How do I obtain the Silk Touch enchantment?

The Silk Touch enchantment can be obtained by using an enchantment table, anvil, or trading with villagers. It can also be found as a treasure enchantment on tools and weapons.

3. What tools can I enchant with Silk Touch?

Silk Touch can be applied to pickaxes, axes, shovels, and shears. It cannot be applied to swords or other weapons.

4. How do I use Silk Touch in Minecraft?

To use Silk Touch, simply equip a tool with the enchantment and use it on the desired block. The block will be collected and can be placed elsewhere without losing its original attributes.

5. Can I use Silk Touch on all blocks in Minecraft?

No, Silk Touch can only be used on certain blocks such as ice, glass, grass, bookshelves, and ores. It cannot be used on blocks like dirt, cobblestone, or wood.

6. Are there any disadvantages to using Silk Touch in Minecraft?

One of the main disadvantages of using Silk Touch is that it requires a higher level of experience to obtain compared to other enchantments. Additionally, some blocks collected with Silk Touch cannot be crafted, such as ice and glass.