Experience



Experience can be obtained by gathering Experience Orbs from defeated mobs and players. Experience is used for Enchanting.

Behavior
Gathering experience points 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 half of their experience as orbs, rounded down to the nearest point. The other half vanishes. If the player dies from fall damage, no experience orbs will be dropped.

Experience Orbs will not drop from a mob unless the mob is killed by a player or damaged by the player and then can be killed by other means; therefore ordinary mob grinders cannot be used for farming experience (although grinders can be designed to funnel monsters to a holding location, and wear them down to one-hit kills). Experience orbs will "float" or glide toward the player if they are 2-3 blocks away.

Mobs will drop a random number of orbs, and the orbs can have different values. However, the total value will always remain within these values, regardless of difficulty setting:



Leveling Up


Farming Experience Orbs
Experience orb farming refers to automating the process of getting experience orbs. One method of farming experience is to take a monster spawner and, with water flows, arrange that mobs are dropped just far enough to lose all but one half of a heart of health, so that they can be simply killed with a single strike or by throwing a splash potion.

An enclosure that prevents the mobs from damaging the player is often used too.

Trivia

 * Experience orbs will drop from a mob if it dies within 3 seconds being hit by a player. This means you can use fall damage by knocking mobs off a cliff.


 * Experience orbs used to despawn if a player slept before collecting them. This meant that if you died at night and slept before collecting your items, the orbs would disappear when you woke up. This has been fixed; if you sleep after you died, your experience will still be there.
 * Using enchantments does not decrease your score (which is shown on death).
 * In the resources folder of Minecraft, there appears to be a unused sound of leveling up. It cannot be heard in gameplay.
 * If you gain too many experience points (such as a trillion through server commands), the experience bar will disappear altogether as well as your level on your HUD.
 * As of weekly snapshot 12w04a the Bottle_o%27_Enchanting was added but is likely worthless since you don't need any experience when enchanting in the snapshot 12w05a.

Bugs

 * Experience is not always rewarded after killing an animal/mob/player, this may be due to effects such as "Fire Aspect" for swords which do additional damage and that damage may not be attributed to you. Animals/mobs should give experience 100% of the time if you use a standard sword and the killing blow is yours.


 * When bringing a single player map into a server to, for example, show friends what you made, Your experience for your single player will be reset upon bringing the save back into single player.

Upcoming Features
Each level up will potentially reward the player with Skill Points, which Notch has said may be used for buying things such as increased jump height and increased maximum health.

History

 * Experience was originally revealed by Jeb during an interview. Jeb released a picture of the 1.8 GUI list, which shows the experience bar, among other things.
 * Experience was added in Beta 1.8 but there was no measurable benefit to gaining Experience Orbs and levels.
 * The ability to spend experience levels for Enchanting items was added in 1.0. Experience requirements were also changed in this update.