5 Best Ways to Get XP in Minecraft 1.19

Image: Mojang via HGG / Nathan Hart

Human Made

I'm a stand-up comic by night and write for HGG by day. Most of my gaming happens at an improvised desk at the Days Inn right outside whatever small town I'm in for the night.

Reviewed by Benjamin Barr

It goes without saying that there are a lot of ways to play Minecraft. One of the most popular is the Survival mode, where monsters and other forces of nature try to slow your progression towards defeating the Ender Dragon. One of the best ways to counter these challenges is with enchantments, a feature typically unlocked when a player finds their first few diamonds and builds an enchanting table.

The enchanting table lets you spend glowing green orbs of experience to make some sections of the game much easier, or even possible outright! Players can even store XP for later by enchanting books. It can be quite the ordeal to get the necessary experience to make an enchantment, though. Today, we’re covering the best ways to get XP in Minecraft.

Let’s get started!

Best Way to Get XP in Minecraft, Ranked

We’ve ranked the best ways to get XP in Minecraft based on what we think is good, to what we think is the best use of your time.

5/5

Monster Hunting

In Minecraft, it takes 1395 points of experience to get all the way from Level 0 to Level 30, the maximum level that can be spent on a single enchantment. That equates to the XP reward from nearly three hundred standard monsters like Zombies, Skeletons, or the dreaded Creepers!

You can see why this common method of XP generation might be less than desirable early on unless you’re truly certain of your combat skills. Even a well-armed and experienced player can get caught off guard by a Creeper and knocked into just the wrong spot, losing you all that hard-fought XP.

We advise not going out into the night just looking for a fight. However, if you’re going to go, take an enchanted weapon, armor, and shield with you, and keep your back to a wall.

Monster Hunting in the Nether

The same advice applies to fighting in the Nether, where risk and reward are both amplified. You should also try to get ahold of a Fire Resistance potion. It will give you immunity to the plentiful lava of the Nether, should you be knocked into it.

Another great resource to have on your side when you venture into the Nether for monster hunting is a bow with a high level of the Power enchantment attached to it.

Who should I target for more XP?

The easiest enemy to take down for XP tends to be Zombies. It helps a lot to have the Smite enchantment on your sword if you’re going after them. Smite works on Zombies, Skeletons, and Nether Skeletons. An efficient alternative once you’re used to the pacing of fighting mobs is taking on the Slime mobs that spawn in swamp areas and deep underground.

They split into smaller versions of themselves each time they are killed. The biggest Slimes are actually worth a total of 16 xp, and can be brought down without too much difficulty if you know how to watch your back.

Once you’ve “beaten” the game, you can also re-engage the fight with the Ender dragon for 500xp every time you fight it.

4/5

Automatic Brick Furnace

When you get down into a cave in Minecraft and start looking for minerals like iron or diamonds, you’re bound to break up a lot of stone into cobblestone on the way down. You might want to just dump all that cobblestone out of your inventory so you can keep mining.

But hold on! To maximize your XP gain, instead, you need to take that cobblestone upstairs with you and put it right into an automatic furnace.

It’s easy to make a furnace automatic in the early game:

Put yourself into sneak mode
Place your furnace
Put a hopper on one side of it, and another on top.
Put a chest on top of both of the hoppers
Fill one up with cobblestone
Fill another with fuel like coal or charcoal.

Whenever you stop by to empty it out, you’ll have some XP waiting for you as a reward for turning cobblestone back into stone. You can now turn into stone bricks for use as a classic medieval-style building material.

Game Progression

Later on, when you gain access to the Nether via a Nether Portal, you’ll gather large amounts of a flammable, hard, but easily breakable block called Netherrack. You can use the same automatic furnace we built before to smelt down all this Netherrack into Nether Bricks and use these to add a dark, menacing flair to your creative designs. Plus, melting the Netherrack down also rewards XP just like smelting Cobblestone.

3/5

Villager Trading Hall

An excellent way to earn XP while staying safe, productive, and experiencing lots of parts of the game at once is to set up a villager trading hall. You get plenty of XP whenever you make a trade with a villager. You also get to shrink your piles of plenty of “junk” resources like rotten meat, extra string, or the extra coal you might have after you gain access to the Nether, with its plentiful lava acting as a replacement furnace fuel.

Make sure you have a contained area with room for at least one of each kind of villager profession. A good way to boost the value of a trading hall is to go off into the wilds and find a group of Pillagers, Villager-like mobs that carry crossbows. When you slay the leader of the group that carries a banner, you’ll get a particular status effect. This effect will trigger a raid the next time you get a certain radius from any group of villagers.

The raid will be several waves of difficult enemies. But, if you properly build your defenses and wear at least a suit of iron armor, you can fend off the raid and enjoy the Hero of the Village buff. This buff will give you discounts on all items traded with the villager trading hall. The raid itself will also send plenty of high-value targets at you. For instance, the Ravager, the highest XP-valued enemy you can encounter in the Overworld.

Which villagers should you trade with for XP?

The best villagers to start a trading hall with are a Butcher and a Farmer. You get these from having a Smoker block and a Composter block, respectively. These will allow you to trade in raw meat and farmed vegetables for Emeralds, and you can use these Emeralds to buy cooked food.

Another great starter villager is the Fletcher. Fletcher can sell you arrows once you level them up, greatly simplifying the collection of ammo for your bow or crossbow. Later on, you’ll gain access to the Priest by building a potion station. The Priest will take all the raw meat you’ve collected while fighting off Zombies at night.

2/5

Start a Ranch

Alongside your trading hall, you’re going to want to start a ranch, with a small fenced-off area containing at least a few of each kind of animal. You’ll get XP from breeding the animals together. Start a farm nearby for wheat so you’ll have plenty of food to feed the animals. Then, when you have enough gathered up at once, you can butcher the whole flock yourself for more resources and XP. Just be sure to leave a few pairs alive so it’s easy to get the farm going again.

You can use the leather, meat, feathers, and wool you’ll receive from running your ranch on various crafting projects. It’s also smart to make a smoker automatic in a similar way to the furnace from before. That way you can just deposit the meat and collect the XP it produces after it gets cooked.

Which animals should I breed for XP in Minecraft?

Cows, Mooshroom Cows, and Sheep are all bred with wheat. Chickens are bred with any kind of seed, and Pigs are bred with carrots, beetroots, or potatoes. Once you breed the animals, it takes about five minutes for them to be ready to breed again, then another twenty minutes before their children turn into adults. It’s not a bad idea to try and find another activity on this list you can pursue at the same time while your farm is active.

1/5

Go Mining

Ultimately, the best way to get more XP in Minecraft is just to go mining. Exploring caves is a fun way to do it, though you may encounter fewer minerals than if you were to strip-mine the walls of a deep hole. For the purposes of generating the most XP, though, finding one of the naturally-generated cave features can be a great way to mine for more XP. You’ll likely encounter numerous monsters as you do so.

In Patch 1.19, the Wild Update, you’ll want to be searching around Y -59 to find the most diamonds. Diamonds are both one of the most powerful resources in the game, and also reward the most XP upon their extraction. At that level, you can also find huge veins of iron ore. These are used for numerous projects in the game and also rewards good amounts of XP.

What to Look Out for While Mining for XP

But, you need to be careful digging that deep, as the recently-introduced enemy The Warden spawns around the new Deep Dark locations, and is extremely dangerous. This area also spawns Skulk blocks, which can be broken to reward a whole point of experience apiece. Unusually, the quickest tool to break Skulk blocks is actually a hoe. This implies they’re a sort of plant or dirt-like substance.

Just like any other part of the game, the more risk you subject yourself to, the more XP you can harvest. So take your chances but always be ready to retreat so you don’t lose your hard-earned XP!

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Happy gaming!