In Minecraft, it's clear that enchanting at level 30 gives the maximum chance for the most and highest enchantments. However, is it always best to wait until that level of experience is accumulated before enchanting (and presumably avoiding doing anything but farming experience in the meantime), or will it be faster/better to enchant tools at lower levels in the meantime?
To make this concrete: if I have 15 levels and no enchanted tools, is it better to:
- work with unenchanted tools and save the levels until I get to 30
- enchant some tools with what I've got, and use those until they break, accumulating back up to 30 along the way
- go fight some monsters and accumulate XP in another way, and use that to enchant tools at the highest level
?
I'm not just interested in the best final tools for their own sake, but in getting there most efficiently.
Best Answer
Truth be said, sacrifice some time working with non-enchanted tools to build an XP grinder, and then enchanting anywhere below 30th level becomes pointless - simply reaching that 30 becomes so trivial that top-level enchantments become cheap. I do have quite a few iron tools enchanted at 30, simply because diamond became far more scarce than XP.
So, in short, the answer to your question may depend on how you obtain your XP; if you plan to build an XP grinder, there really is no point to hoard it until then, use up whatever you have. OTOH, if you plan to skip all the easy XP collection techniques (mob grinder, bulk cow/pig breeding, mining Nether Quartz, or building a hundred furnaces over a lake of lava and turning a desert worth of sand into glass) you'd better keep saving.
(still, enchanting normal materials equipment with cheap - lvl1-5 enchantments is cheap enough that it might be worthwhile.)