Although Minecraft itself doesn't have quests or set directions players should go, the advancements found in particular in the Java Edition of the game give the player some general goals on what to do and how to interact with the game's open-world sandbox. Many of these advancements are really simple, from getting wood or mining stone, and shouldn't present any major issues for even beginner players.

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However, there are other, more difficult advancements in Minecraft that truly test the limits of even the most seasoned players. Many of them border on being downright ridiculous, and rather than pushing forward the game's "narrative", they're more like challenges that players can attempt to complete throughout their journey. For the completionists out there, the following advancements from Java Edition of Minecraft are by far some of the toughest ones to unlock.

Updated on November 12, 2022, by Anastasia Maillot: Advancements continue to be the best way for experienced players to challenge themselves in Minecraft when things start to go a bit stale. With the 1.20 update somewhere fairly far away on the horizon, getting a few of these done can be a great way to spice up the game in the meantime. The initial list showcased some of the toughest advancements in the game, and while those remain true and the same, there are many additional challenges that weren't mentioned, which undoubtedly deserve a spot here due to their high difficulty and trickiness. Here's which advancements are the hardest in Minecraft to complete.

14 Great View From Up Here

Minecraft Shulker In End City

This Minecraft advancement is one of those that players can potentially unlock by accident. If not, they'll have to go out of their way to unlock it. Head over to an End City, where players need to float up to 50 meters into the air through a shulker missile, which applies the levitation status effect on the player.

Not only is this advancement dangerous, as players will be floating up very high and potentially risking death as they eventually come down, but it also implies players will need to head to the End and find an End City with enough shulkers in one spot. It also means subjecting themselves to damage from shulkers, which is nothing to scoff at, especially if players haven't prepared proper diamond or Netherite armor at this stage in Minecraft.

13 Two Birds, One Arrow

Minecraft Phantom

Phantoms are special mobs that fly in the air at night and spawn only when the player hasn't slept in three nights. This "insomnia" is what draws these creatures in, and they will hunt down the player every night until they sleep to stop them from spawning.

Two Birds, One Arrow is a special advancement in Minecraft related to these Phantoms. Players need to use a crossbow that has the Piercing enchantment and land a shot that kills two Phantoms in a single strike. This is extremely challenging, as Phantoms tend to fly around in annoying patterns. Occasionally, however, two Phantoms fly in sync and as they lunge down slowly, players might be lucky enough to get a piercing shot in from their crossbow.

12 Arbalistic

Arbalistic is another crossbow-related advancement. This one requires players to kill five mobs with a single crossbow shot, which doesn't seem too difficult at first glance given players have access to useful enchantments like Multishot and Piercing. However, these mobs need to all be unique mobs. That means players must kill five different mobs in a single shot, with an enchanted crossbow.

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There's so much to consider here: where to find the mobs, how to get the perfect crossbow with the right enchantments, and so on. The mobs need to be lined up, too, for it to work properly, which can result in a lot of failed attempts for players, making this one of the toughest advancements in Minecraft.

11 The End...Again...

minecraft ender dragon

Defeating the Ender Dragon in Minecraft is one thing, but defeating him a second time over after summoning him once again is another. Sure, by this time players will likely have great gear and good weapons, and they'll have learned from their first fight against the Ender Dragon, but that still doesn't remove the challenge from this task.

The trick is also to resummon the boss. Players will need to craft four End Crystals, which require Ghast tears that can be a pain to farm for more inexperienced players. Ghasts can sometimes die over lava pools or large drops in the Nether, and that makes getting their loot difficult in the first place.

10 Serious Dedication

Minecraft Player With A Netherite Hoe

Starting off with something extremely unexciting and fairly simple is Serious Dedication. Players need to use up a Netherite hoe completely until it has no durability and it breaks. On paper, it sounds extremely easy, as it doesn't involve the player risking their lives, other than to actually get their hands on the said Netherite. They'll first have to craft a Diamond hoe, then upgrade it to Netherite, which are both a waste of resources.

After that, players will need time. A lot of it. The Netherite hoe has a durability of 2031, which means it can be used 2031 times before it breaks. Now, imagine tilling the ground that many times in the game. Needless to say, players will need some wrist support after a while given the intense and ridiculous nature of this advancement. Luckily, there's a small trick: using a Netherite hoe to hit a mob also counts as a single durability point, so next time players need a weapon while mining in the caves, they may as well use their Netherite hoe.

9 Return To Sender

A Minecraft Ghast flying through the sky

When it comes to difficult advancements that are relatively accessible even to newer players, the Return to Sender advancement is probably the best example. To unlock it, players will have to kill a Ghast with its very own fireball that it spits out. This obviously requires the players to have access to the Nether and for them to find themselves a Ghast, as well as a relatively safe location in the Nether where they can kite the Ghast's attacks without falling into lava.

When a Ghast spits out a fireball, players can actually whack the ball back using a sword, which will deflect it into the Ghast's face. It's easier to do this if the Ghast is relatively close since these fireballs don't track targets. It's also possible to use an arrow to shoot the fireball, which can be a bit more reliable as players won't have to think about timing a sword slash correctly and potentially scorch themselves.

8 Cover Me In Debris

Netherite Armor in Minecraft

For the longest time, Diamond gear was the best gear in Minecraft. However, with the 1.16 Nether update, everything changed thanks to the introduction of Netherite. This new material can be smelted and crafted out of Ancient Debris, which spawns exclusively in the molten depths of the Nether and is therefore extremely tricky and dangerous to mine. Not just that, players can only upgrade Diamond gear to Netherite, as crafting gear purely out of Netherite isn't an option.

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So, it goes without saying a lot of time, grinding, and dedication are needed to unlock this advancement, which will have the player wear a full set of Netherite armor. There are a few tricks when it comes to mining Netherite, such as using beds to mine through Netherrack quickly. Netherite ingots will also require the player to have gold ingots at hand, so make sure to spend some time mining gold nuggets in the Nether and gold ore in the Overworld as well.

7 Beaconator

Minecraft Beacon how to make

Beacons are powerful endgame objects that players can craft once they have defeated the Wither. This alone is quite a grind. To summon the Wither, players will need three Wither Skeleton Skulls, which can take a long time to find just from killing Wither Skeletons. Having a Looting III sword will considerably speed up the progress, but it will still be a matter of RNG. After that, they'll need to actually kill the Wither, which is no lightweight boss mob either.

Once players have crafted the beacon from five glass blocks, the Nether Star, and three obsidian blocks, they will need to build a pyramid for it. The Beaconator advancement requires a fully leveled pyramid of four levels, which must be fully crafted out of iron, gold, diamond, or emerald blocks. Yes, blocks. The sheer time and effort required for this are considerable, but by the time players encounter the Wither, they should already have quite the stock of ores available.

6 Two By Two

Minecraft Boats With Animals

At some point in the game, likely quite early on, players will need to start breeding some of the animals they find in their world. Not only is this important for food, but it's also part of one of the toughest advancements in the game to breed every animal in Minecraft. For reference, there are twenty-two mobs that players will need to first find and then breed with the correct foods in order to complete this monumental task.

While most mobs like sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, and horses will be fairly easy to find due to being abundant in forest and plains biomes, other mobs will be far trickier. Mooshrooms, ocelots, and axolotls will likely be some of the hardest ones to find, with Mooshrooms unique and exclusive to the mushroom island biome. Axolotls spawn typically in pools of water in lush caves, while ocelots are extremely rare and shy mobs found in jungle biomes.

5 A Complete Catalogue

Minecraft-how-to-tame-cats

Speaking of animals, cats are the subject of another insanely difficult Minecraft advancement called A Complete Catalogue. In this one, players will need to tame every single cat variant found in Minecraft. Currently, there are eleven of them in the game, all characterized by a unique breed name and appearance.

While the task itself won't be particularly difficult, since cats just need to be tempted and then tamed with raw cod or raw salmon while sneaking, finding all these eleven variants will be somewhat of a headache. A lot of RNG is involved in the process, but the simplest way to do this is to simply try and find villages scattered around the world. These are the most common places for cats to spawn.

4 A Balanced Diet

Minecraft Foods

Another thing that's in abundance in Minecraft is food. There are many of them, some great and some not-so-great sources of hunger in the world, and the purpose of this advancement is to consume them all, even just once. And yes, that includes items that cause harm to the player, including Poisonous Potatoes, Rotten Flesh, and Pufferfish, not to mention the raw version of every single meat type.

And if that wasn't daunting enough, keep in mind that there are a total of 40 different foods in the game, some of which can be quite tricky for the player to get their hands on, or at least require a bit of good luck to find. Enchanted Golden Apples, Bottled Honey, Chorus Fruit, Glow Berries, and Golden Carrots will be some of the more niche foods that players might slightly struggle to find.

3 Adventuring Time

Minecraft-Biomes-4

For players who thought things couldn't get worse with 40 foods to find, they absolutely can get worse. The Adventuring Time advancement will require the player to visit 52 different biomes found in the Overworld of Minecraft. The only consolation here is that Nether biomes are not included in this equation and have their own (much easier) advancement to unlock. However, the introduction of cave biomes has complicated the matter by requiring players to now also visit these underground biomes, too.

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Although the grand majority of these biomes are fairly common and easy to find if players just go out exploring, there are some that can be a real headache to discover. Namely, the deep dark biome where the Warden lurks, mushroom fields that are unique to Mushroom Islands, ice spike biomes, and occasionally jungle biome variants and badlands can get annoyingly rare and tough for some players to find depending on the seed.

2 Uneasy Alliance

Minecraft Ghast In The Nether

Ghasts are some of the most annoying dangers in Minecraft's Nether, and so it would only be appropriate for them to be included in the second toughest advancement in the game. This one is unlocked when players transport a Ghast from the Nether into the Overworld and then kill it in the Overworld. The task at hand is monumental, requiring players to first build a Nether portal large enough for the Ghast to fit through, and then somehow guide the Ghast into the portal.

There are methods to this madness, though the easiest one has players access the Nether roof area through an Ender Pearl glitch. Up there, players have more control over where they spawn mobs since the roof is made entirely of bedrock, on which mobs are unable to spawn. Then, it's a matter of trapping the ghast into a boat or minecart when they eventually do spawn, and sending them through the portal before they blow the portal and the player up.

1 How Did We Get Here

Minecraft tipped arrow Brewing Stand menu Lingering Potions

Minecraft features a bunch of different status effects, some good and some bad. In total, there are twenty-seven of them, and to apply them all at once within a short time frame can seem like a downright impossibility. Videos of players using redstone machines to apply these effects more effectively at once have circulated in the Minecraft community, which has made unlocking this advancement a bit easier.

Some of the weirdest status effects, as well as the hardest, that players will need to have at the same time are Darkness from the Warden, Hero of the Village after a raid, Levitation from a shulker, Conduit power from a Conduit, and Dolphin's grace from a Dolphin swimming nearby. Lieinuxxseus showcased his incredibly elaborate method on how to apply these status effects all at once in the 1.19 update, so players interested in replicating his method should check out his in-depth guide on unlocking what is without a doubt the hardest advancement in the game right now.

Minecraft is available on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, and many other platforms.

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