Experience



Experience (EXP or XP for short) can be obtained by gathering experience orbs from mining, defeated mobs and players, breeding, fishing, and using furnaces. As tradition, experience points accumulate into experience levels. However, unlike many games, experience levels do not directly increase the character's abilities. Instead, experience is used for enchanting and anvils, to produce weapons, armor, and tools with various useful abilities.

Behavior
Most experience comes in the form of experience orbs, small green and yellow spheres that move toward the player and will automatically be added to their total when collected. Experience orbs cannot be added to the player's inventory.

Gathering experience points from experience orbs increases the player's experience level by gradually filling a bar on the bottom of the screen until a new level is achieved when the bar is full. When the player dies, they drop experience orbs worth 7 * current level experience points, up to a maximum of 100 points (enough to reach level 7). All the other experience vanishes.

Experience can be gained from several different sources:
 * From killing monsters, which drop experience orbs along with any other items.
 * A mob will not drop experience unless it dies within five seconds (100 game ticks) of an attack registered as a player hit (including tamed wolves and TNT). This allows gaining experience from, say, knocking a monster off a cliff (fetching the orbs might be another question). You can also try to "claim" a burning monster by hitting or shooting it once—even if the blow doesn't kill it, if the fire does within 5 seconds, it will drop XP. (5 seconds of fire only does damage, but of course you can keep trying.)
 * Mobs killed by TNT activated by a player using flint and steel will drop XP as usual; however mobs killed by TNT that was activated by fire, redstone, or an explosion that wasn't player activated don't drop any experience.
 * Mobs will drop a random number of orbs, and the orbs can have different values. However, the total value will always remain within the values given below, regardless of difficulty setting.
 * Hostile mobs give more experience than passive ones. Baby animals, bats, golems, and villagers give no experience at all. The ender dragon gives orbs totalling 12,000 XP the first time a player kills her – over 200 times more than anything else in the game – and 500 XP the next times.
 * Some hostile mobs spawn with weapons, or can spawn with weapons and/or armor. These mobs give an extra 1–3 points (randomly) per piece of equipment that they spawned with. Equipment picked up after spawning doesn't count.
 * Mining (destroying) a spawner block gives 15–43 points of experience as orbs.
 * From mining any ore that drops a resource, rather than ore. The orbs are produced along with the mineral item(s). If a Silk Touch pick is used to mine the ore block, the experience is not dropped, but the block can later be placed and mined normally to release the mineral and the experience.
 * The ore will still produce orbs if destroyed by an explosion, whether or not it was caused by player activated TNT.
 * From smelting any of various items.
 * Smelting any ore yields some experience, but normally only iron and gold are worthwhile. For all other ores, mining them is better.
 * Moderate amounts are gained by smelting/cooking other materials: food, clay balls or blocks, cactus, wood logs, sand, or cobblestone.
 * The smelted material must be taken from the furnace through its GUI window. If you use a hopper to unload the furnace, it is possible to retrieve all experience produced by the furnace by smelting an extra item and taking it from the GUI. Dumping the contents by breaking the furnace destroys the experience.
 * From breeding animals, which produces orbs where the parents are, along with the baby animal. Breaking eggs does not give experience.
 * From fishing. The experience is awarded immediately upon reeling in the fish, even if the fish itself is not picked up.
 * From trading with villagers.
 * A bottle o' enchanting releases orbs when broken.
 * From the command.
 * From disenchanting item in grindstone.

Experience orbs
Experience orbs fade between a green and yellow color and will "float" or glide toward the player up to a distance of 6 blocks, speeding up as they get nearer to the player. Experience orbs pulled towards a player are slowed by spider webs. Experience orbs can also be pulled around or away from the player by running water currents.

When collected, experience orbs make a Christmas bell-like sound for a split second. Unlike resources, experience points are picked up gradually: no matter how many orbs are in range of the player, they will be added to the player's experience one at a time (around 10 orbs/second). In extreme cases, this can result in the player being followed by a swarm of orbs for many seconds. If an experience orb isn't collected within 5 minutes of its appearance, it will disappear.

Experience orbs vary in value, but naturally spawned orbs will always have an integer value of 1–11, 17, 37, 73, 149, 307, 617, 1237, or theoretically 2477 (although currently no orbs with this value will spawn). Fishing, breeding, and trading drop a single orb with a random value in the appropriate range. Breaking blocks, killing mobs and players, smelting items, and bottles o' enchanting calculate their total experience amount and then split it into values of 1, 3, 7, 17, 37, 73, 149, 307, 617, 1237, and 2477. Higher values are chosen first, so for example a total value of 1000 would be dropped as orbs with values 617, 307, 73, and three 1s. Note that while the first Ender Dragon in a world drops 12,000 experience, it is dropped in 10 waves of 1000 and one of 2000, so no orbs of value 2477 are dropped.

The general worth of an orb is reflected by its size, with eleven possible sizes corresponding to values 1–2, 3–6, 7–16, 17–36, 37–72, 73–148, 149–306, 307–616, 617–1236, 1237–2476, and 2477 and up.

Experience orbs can be destroyed by fire, lava, explosions and cacti, and can trigger pressure plates and tripwires. Although mob drops spawn the instant the final blow is dealt to the mob, experience orbs do not until the mob entity disappears and the smoke appears. Experience orbs can also stop minecarts.

Experience amounts by source
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The experience level costs were heavily revised in snapshot 12w22a and 12w23a. Before these, reaching level 50 (the maximum usable on a single enchantment) required 4625 experience, corresponding to defeating 925 hostile mobs (assuming the "common" ones.) Afterwards, considerably less experience is needed to get into higher levels (The amount which would formerly get the player to level 30 now gets them to level 39). Higher levels cost more experience than lower ones, but the levels are still easier to get than in 1.2.5. Now level 30 is the maximum for enchantments, and that cost is equivalent of 165 "common" mobs, less than 1/5 the old price.

Trivia

 * Using experience on enchanting or repairing does not decrease the score which is shown upon death.
 * If the player gains too many experience points, such as 1 trillion, the experience bar and level counter will completely disappear from the HUD. This appears to occur around level 32,767 or 215&minus;1, the largest value representable by a 16-bit signed integer.
 * The maximum XP that can be gained from the command is 2,147,483,647 levels or 231&minus;1, the largest value representable by a 32-bit signed integer and by Java's int type.
 * With 2,147,483,647 experience, the player has 1,241,258 levels.
 * While the maximum experience gained is up 2,147,483,647, the maximum level afterwards is only up to 24,791.
 * Every 5 levels, a special XP sound plays. The sound will play each time the player reaches a multiple of 5 levels.
 * Before Beta 1.9 Prerelease 2, the score read &e0.
 * This was caused by a error in which, the game renders color text. §e0 would render the text as 0, but shaded bright yellow. From Indev 0.31 (the version in which the precursor to experience, a score system, was removed after Survival Test) to this version, a bug arose where it would display &e0 instead, a common error when formatting color text in Minecraft (except on custom servers with the plugin to override this).