Combat is an unavoidable part of Minecraft if you're playing on survival. There's going to be a time when you'll face too many enemies with too much range to be able to deal with them. In that scenario, you either have to take cover or fight, ranged as well with the use of a bow.
Alternatively, you could use a shield. It's one of the most overlooked items in Minecraft, yet its utility is undeniable. It can make a huge difference early on in a game that's at Normal difficulty or above. We're sharing everything there is to know about shields, as well as a guide on how to craft one.
10 Why Make A Shield?
If you're still not fully sold on the idea of a shield, let's paint a picture for you. One of the most common mobs in the game is a skeleton, which also happens to be one of the most annoying ones to deal with. They often use range to get to you, and can use the knockback from their arrows to push you down cliffs or into lava pits.
This can really wreck a game at higher difficulties, especially when exploring dangerous caves and scavenging for resources. Given that a shield is so easy to make and relatively cheap in crafting ingredients, there's really no excuse not to make one to help you survive longer.
9 What It Can Do
Everyone knows what a shield is meant for: to block damage. However, the kind of damage it can block varies. It has the ability to nullify most of the basic attacks in the game, including all arrows, melee attacks, thorns, tridents, fireballs, bullets, lasers, as well as the blast damage of any explosions.
Given that it can block out so much and completely remove damage from the majority of attacks, it's one of the most valuable items to have in the game, especially when fighting mobs in the Nether or in the End.
8 How To Buy One Instead
If for some reason you don't have the means to make a shield but you have tons of emeralds available and you've made decent friends with local villagers, you can also opt to buy a shield from an armorer villager. Armorers wear a leather apron and will have metallic welding masks attached to their foreheads.
Shields tend to be higher tier trade items, so you'll need to trade with the armorer first to unlock the trade. Sometimes you might get lucky. The armorers will tend to sell a shield for 5 emeralds, so prepare accordingly for that.
7 Ingredients
If you do want to make a shield rather than buy one, it's not difficult to find all the ingredients. First, you'll need to get yourself some wood. Any type will do, and you can even use mixed types of wood in the same recipe and it will still work.
Once you've found wood and converted it into wooden blanks, you'll need to get some iron. One single ingot will be just enough to make a shield, so finding one piece of iron in a cave will do perfectly.
6 Crafting Recipe
After you have all the ingredients gathered, you want to craft the shield on the larger crafting grid found on the crafting table (not the one in your inventory). You need to arrange the items in the shape of a downward pointing triangle of sorts. Here's the recipe row by row:
Top row: wooden plank, iron ingot and wooden plank. Middle row: three wooden planks. Bottom row: one wooden plank in the centermost grid.
5 Fixing Your Shield
Like most items in Minecraft, your shield will have a durability bar once you start using it. Equip it into your left-hand slot and press M2 to use your shield to block out any incoming attacks that were mentioned above. You'll start to see the bar decay over time.
Depending on the strength of the attacks, your shield might deplete quickly. You can either combine two slightly depleted shields for one fully repaired shield, with an added 5% durability bonus, or you can use an anvil to combine it with planks and fix it that way.
4 Colorful Shields
Your shield will appear just as a basic wooden one at the beginning. While you can make small changes to make it look nicer, it won't actually improve how well it blocks damage or how long its durability stays up. If you play on the Java Edition of Minecraft, you can still make tiny cosmetic changes.
If you have a banner pattern in your inventory, you can combine that with the shield within a crafting grid to receive a customized shield. Any pattern can be applied to a shield, but keep in mind that due to the size of the shield the patterns might not always appear authentic to their original look.
3 Enchanting A Shield
You may have not realized this but yes, even your shields can enchanted. The difference is that you'll need to apply enchantments on it by using an anvil rather than an enchantment table. This means you first need to acquire an enchanted book to combine your shield with.
Only a select few enchantments will be compatible with your shield. You can apply any level of Unbreaking, which will boost its durability by quite a bit. Mending can also be applied to a shield, essentially making it unbreakable. You can also enchant it with Curse of Vanishing, but there's no point unless you're playing a prank on a friend.
2 Exceptions To Blocking
While the shield can do a lot, there are a few exceptions to its capacity to block. Any bow enchanted with Piercing will be able to damage you through your shield. Splash potions and dragon's breath will also go through your shield, as well as TNT damage that you're causing to yourself.
The worst enemy to shield against are Vindicators, who can actually make your shield unusable for 5 seconds once hit. Keep this in mind if you happen to face one off at a Woodland Mansion or during a raid.
1 Range
The shield also has a specific range it can block. Obviously, it will block any damage in front of you, but anything behind and horizontally on your side is bound to hit and damage you even when you're shielding. Same goes for damage from above or below you, unless you specifically block for it.
It should go without saying, but fall damage cannot be countered with blocking.