Protection is an enchantment applied to armor that adds bonus damage reduction.
Usage
Protection reduces the damage taken from all sources except for damage caused by hunger, a warden's sonic boom attack, the void, or the /kill command. This enchantment is capable of reducing damage from sources that normally ignore the user's armor value, such as magic damage from harming/poison potions.
The formula for damage reduction is (4 × level)% for each armor piece, for a maximum damage reduction of 64% if all armor pieces are enchanted with Protection IV.
Unlike some of the other armor enchantments (e.g. Blast Protection), Protection offers no side effects outside of damage reduction.
Damage reduction from Protection, Fire Protection, Feather Falling, Blast Protection, and Projectile Protection stacks up to an upper limit of 80% (see armor enchantments). However, it is impossible to reach this cap with the base Protection enchantment alone as it is impossible to obtain Protection V in survival mode.
The protection enchantment is applied after the armor's damage reduction. For example, 20 armor points provide a 4% * 20 = 80% damage reduction. If the total protection enchantment levels on said armor adds up to 10, they would provide 40% damage reduction. This would equate to a result of 88% damage reduction, as it stacks multiplicatively rather than additively.
In our example, our armor reduced the damage we took by 80%, which means 20% of the original damage is going to hurt us. However, if we also have 10 levels of Protection, we get another 40% damage reduction. However, this 40% reduction only applies to the damage that was not blocked by our armor, which is the remaining 20% of the original attack's damage. 40% of 20 is 8 (20*0.4=8), which means an additional 8% of the original attack's damage is blocked by our 10 levels of Protection.
Incompatibilities
Protection, Blast Protection, Fire Protection, and Projectile Protection are mutually exclusive. Attempting to combine these enchantments with an anvil will delete the enchantment in the upgrade slot and replace it with the enchantment in the sacrifice slot. However, if commands are used to force two or more of these enchantments on the same item, the effects stack.
Data values
ID
| Name | Identifier | Translation key |
|---|---|---|
| Protection | protection | enchantment.minecraft.protection |
| Name | Identifier | Numeric ID | Translation key |
|---|---|---|---|
| Protection | protection | 0 | enchantment.protect.all |
History
| Java Edition | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.0.0 | Beta 1.9 Prerelease 3 | Added Protection. | |||
| 1.9 | 15w36a | Protection enchantments have been nerfed; their bonuses are now linear instead of quadratic. | |||
| 1.14 | 19w02a | Protection enchantments are no longer mutually exclusive. | |||
| 1.14.3 | Pre-Release 2 | Protection enchantments are now once again mutually exclusive. | |||
| 1.19 | Pre-release 3 | The Warden's sonic boom attacks now ignore this enchantment. | |||
| Pocket Edition Alpha | |||||
| v0.12.1 | build 1 | Added Protection. | |||
| Bedrock Edition | |||||
| 1.18.30 | beta 1.18.30.20 | Protection enchantments have been nerfed to match Java Edition. | |||
| Legacy Console Edition | |||||
| TU7 | CU1 | 1.0 | Patch 1 | 1.0.1 | Added Protection. |
Issues
Issues relating to "Protection" are maintained on the bug tracker. Report issues there.
References