I’m new to Minecraft and did a lot of googling but everyone has a different answer for silk touch.

Does anyone have a definite way to get it with an enchantment table?

Some say you need to be level 17 and have 9 bookshelves before it will show up (random). Others say you need to be between level 20 and 30. One says 30. Another says you can just keep trying over and over using a grindstone to remove the wrong enchantment before trying again.

  • @bisby
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    252 months ago

    If you find a villager with no job. Trap it. Place a lectern next to it. It becomes a librarian. Check what it sells. Silk touch? Nope. Break the lectern, the villager reverts to not a librarian. Villagers only keep their jobs if you have bought something from them. Replace the lectern, check (it now has new items for sale), break, rinse and repeat. Once you find it, buy it and the librarian will be locked to always sell it.

    Only downside is you need emeralds. But on the upside, you get infinite silk touch.

    • @Contramuffin
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      82 months ago

      Ah, needing emeralds is a downside? Have you considered a tool called “mass slavery?”

      • pwnicholson
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        52 months ago

        Sugar cane auto farmer = paper = infinite emeralds This is my first week in any Minecraft world for me now

        • lemmyng
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          32 months ago

          By the time you can craft sugar cane auto farmers you can craft pumpkin auto farmers, which are more emerald efficient. Until then I would recommend a meat farm (pigs/sheep/cows) to level butchers, and sweet berries (which grow insanely fast and just need dirt and light) for emeralds.

          • pwnicholson
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            32 months ago

            That’s not villager efficient though. Librarians that give you enchants will take paper. Farmers waste spots in a villager hall IMO. Not that much of a difference in trade value, and sugar cane you can have a crop on every block where pumpkin requires every other block

            • lemmyng
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              2 months ago

              Farmers are IMO much better for getting emeralds than librarians, because you can trade both pumpkins and watermelon (which the crafter block now makes less of a pain to store). In terms of auto farmers with chests for overflow storage, watermelon + pumpkin are much more emerald dense than paper too (6 pumpkin/4 melon per emerald vs 24 paper per emerald). Plus you can trade for golden carrots with maxed farmers, which are one of the best foods for hunger saturation and can be used to breed horses.

              Pumpkins can also be used to craft jack-o-lanterns, which are convenient early in the game as lit blocks, and the seeds can go straight into a composter (which you’ll conveniently have right next to the farmer).

              Also you need leather to craft books (unless you buy bookshelves and chop them down, which I find annoying), which brings us back to cows, and if you have cows you may as well have sheep and pigs, and a butcher.

              • pwnicholson
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                22 months ago

                Interesting.

                Hit 2 stronghold libraries: more books than you’ll use in a game.

                I guess I also take for granted that I build a zero tick kelp-to-bonemeal-to-cane-to-paper machine that fills a double chest with paper in about 1-2 hours tops, and it’s not running at max efficiency.

                Golden carrots are easier to get with a fortune pick on a few rows of carrots and that gives you something to do with all the gold that otherwise has very little use in the game

                • lemmyng
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                  22 months ago

                  Hah, I tend to make huge minecart networks, so I used the gold for the tracks. I know I could technically duplicate them, but that just feels too cheaty to me.

                  And again, I know some other crops can be generated faster, but pumpkins and melons are for me the sweet spot for density. With 4 farmers I can trade 3 stacks of melons and 5 stacks of pumpkins for enough emeralds to get what I need in a day. With paper that’d be 6 stacks of paper per librarian and I’d need 6 librarians to get the same amount of emeralds, so 36 stacks total. I’d rather not click back and forth all the time between my chests and the villagers to do my trading.

      • @[email protected]
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        102 months ago

        One thing here bisby left off. If you check the villager and they are selling Mending books, don’t break the lectern. Find a new villager. :) Also, I have had some luck finding silk touch pickaxes in things like sunken ship chests, or buried treasure chests. You can also try fishing one up, but you better like fishing. It’s my happy place, so I have fished up a lot of them over the years over thousands of hours just fishing. It relaxes me for some reason.

        • @bisby
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          22 months ago

          Yes! Great point. If you find any other book that you really like (Mending being a perfect example)… keep the librarian… find a new villager, and start the process over.

      • @yogurtwrong
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        32 months ago

        You can also farm emeralds by doing the same thing with a fletching table and trying to get a 32 sticks to one emerald trade