How to get Silk Touch in Minecraft

Posted: May 24, 2024 in Minecraft

By Nathan Young

Enchanting in Minecraft is a very powerful system that can strengthen the capabilities of the player’s tools significantly. They are highly valuable as they can help them out with several activities during their adventures. Obtaining the right enchantments can give players a substantial advantage, with Silk Touch being one of the most popular. Silk Touch is a highly sought after enchantment since it lets you collect blocks which are otherwise unobtainable by usual means. In this guide we’ll show you how you can obtain Silk Touch in Minecraft through various ways.
 

What is Silk Touch?

Silk Touch is an enchantment for tools that causes certain blocks to drop themselves instead of their usual loot when they are mined. Many items and blocks are often unobtainable by crafting and mining. Silk Touch ensures you can collect those. It’s especially useful for relocating bee nests, obtaining non-craftable blocks like ores for decorative purposes, or storing more stacks of items to save space in your inventory and chests. Please keep in mind that Silk Touch is incompatible with certain enchantment types like Fortune, so you must choose between the two.
 

How to Obtain Silk Touch?

There are many ways in order to obtain the Silk Touch enchantment for yourself. We’ll show you the different methods you can use and tell you what the fastest and easiest of them are.
 

Looting

As with all other enchantments, Silk Touch can rarely drop from mobs during village raids, and also spawn in chests while exploring dungeons. Though the chances of obtaining a book with Silk Touch are low and rather random, it is still a viable option. We recommend this method only if you are not particularly interested in getting Silk Touch fast and just take your time with it until you encounter it naturally during your adventure.
 

Fishing

It is also possible to obtain an enchanted book with Silk Touch from fishing. But the odds for that to happen is incredibly low. A normal unenchanted fishing rod has a 5% chance of catching treasure, 16.7% chance of which is an enchanted book, giving you a total of 0.8% to get it. Taking into account that there are countless other enchantments, the chance of getting a book with the desired enchantment, in this case Silk Touch, is almost zero. You could use the Luck of the Sea enchantment to increase your chances of catching treasure, but even then it wouldn’t be nearly enough to justify fishing for it. Only use this method if you have an AFK fishing farm or really like fishing in Minecraft.
 

Enchantment table

Probably one of the most common methods to get Silk Touch is through the use of an enchantment table. Since Silk Touch is a level 1 enchantment, having more than 9 bookshelves is unnecessary and will only increase the chances of higher-level enchantments appearing. Make sure you have gathered enough experience before you start since enchanting will cost you levels. After placing your enchantment table follow these steps to efficiently farm for Silk Touch:

1. Craft a bunch of wooden shovels.
2. Place them into the enchantment slot and see if the Silk Touch enchantment appears.
3. If it doesn’t appear, select the cheapest enchantment and place the next shovel in the enchantment table.
4. Repeat step 3 until you see Silk Touch.
5. If Silk Touch is available, replace the wooden shovel with the desired tool you want to have the enchantment on and claim it.

 
Wooden shovels are the cheapest tools to craft and have a limited amount of enchantments available, so the chances of getting Silk Touch are rather high with 16.7%. This is one of the most reliable methods of obtaining the Silk Touch enchantment fast and easy.
 

Trading

Another safe method to obtain Silk Touch is through trading with a villager that has the profession librarian. For this method it is important to know which version of Minecraft you’re currently using. There are two different options available, one for versions before Minecraft 1.20.2, and another for versions after Minecraft 1.20.2. We’ll explain both options so you can choose the one for your version.
 

Prior to version 1.20.2 villager trades would change each time they change their professions, which can be easily done by destroying and replacing their respective profession block.

1. Search for a normal villager without a profession.
2. Place a lectern near the villager to change their profession to librarian. Librarians will have randomized trades with the possibility of having an enchanted book with Silk Touch.
3. Repeatedly break and replace the lectern until the Librarian offers a Silk Touch book in its trades.

 

With the 1.20.2 update villager trade rebalance was introduced to the game which changed the way trading with villagers works, if the experimental toggle was enabled in the settings. Librarians now offer enchanted books depending on the biome they are in.

1. Locate a village in the snowy biomes and find a librarian.
2. Trade with them to level them up until they reach the max level of Master Librarian.
3. Once they’ve reached the highest level they will have the Silk Touch I enchanted book as one of their guaranteed trade offers.

Trading with villagers is a surefire way to acquire the Silk Touch enchantment and very easy as well. Depending on the game version you’re playing, it can literally be a matter of minutes until you get it.
 

Commands

Lastly, if you don’t want to bother with the above methods and don’t mind a little cheating or becoming an operator, you can just use the command:

/enchant [your username] silk_touch 1

This will enchant the item you’re currently holding with Silk Touch. Alternatively you can also use:

/give [your username] enchanted_book{StoredEnchantments:[{lvl:1,id:silk_touch}]}

This will give you an enchanted book with the Silk Touch enchantment.
 

Conclusion

There are many different ways to obtain the precious Silk Touch enchantment for yourself. This enchantment saves time and resources, enabling more efficient mining operations and unlocking creative building potential. Whether by trading, enchanting, fishing, cheating, or casually playing the game, with the above mentioned methods you can get it very easily and start using it on your own Minecraft game server. We hope this Apex Hosting guide helped you learn more about the Silk Touch enchantment and how you can obtain it. Have a good one gamers!