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How to get a Trident in Minecraft

Tridents are rare weapons to acquire in Minecraft, and they take a bit of work to properly maintain.
This article is over 4 years old and may contain outdated information

The trident in Minecraft is an exotic weapon. You can throw it at your enemies, use it as a melee weapon, and even use it to zip through the water at high speeds. There’s a lot of versatility. Unfortunately, it can be a little difficult to locate when you’re running around the game. You don’t have too many options available to you to acquire the weapon. 

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How to get a Trident in Minecraft

You cannot craft tridents. Instead, you can acquire it from the drowned, the zombie-like underwater creatures, or a zombie turned into a drowned.

You also don’t have the best chances of the trident dropping from them. It’s relatively low, but you can increase your chances by having the looting enchantment on your person. Each level of looting increases your overall chances. You have an 8.5 percent chance of looting it if you see one of the drowned carrying it. There’s a natural 11 percent chance of it dropping, with every level of the looting enchantment you have increasing this total by two percent for a total of a 17 percent chance.

You cannot pick up a thrown trident. When one of the drowned throw it at you and miss, you cannot go pick it up to claim it. The trident works similarly to arrows.

A looted trident has random durability, but you can repair it by combining two tridents at an anvil. You can also fix a trident by using the mending enchantment and add points to its durability by looting experience points.

How to make an Enchanted Trident

For those who wish to enhance their trident, you can use it at an enchantment table or anvil. It can receive the following enchantments:

  • Riptide: Launch yourself forward while wielding the trident if you’re underwater or in the rain
  • Channeling: Summon a powerful lightning bolt at the target in front of you when throwing the trident in the rain.
  • Impaling: Increase your attack damage with the trident when fighting aquatic creatures, such as turtles, dolphins, and guardians.
  • Loyalty: After tossing your trident it now returns to your hand without having to go grab it
  • Mending: Restores the durability of the weapon after picking experience orbs
  • Unbreaking: There’s a chance the trident does not suffer any durability lose when being used

Because you have to loot tridents, they normally have low durability, which means the mending and unbreaking enchants are desirable options. These prevent you from having to farm new ones over and over again.


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Zack Palm
Zack Palm is the Senior Writer of Gamepur and has spent over five years covering video games, and earned a Bachelor's degree in Economics from Oregon State University. He spends his free time biking, running tabletop campaigns, and listening to heavy metal. His primary game beats are Pokémon Go, Destiny 2, Final Fantasy XIV, and any newly released title, and he finds it difficult to pull away from any Star Wars game.