Minecraft: Best Ways to Get XP (2023)

Our Best Ways to get XP in Minecraft Guide walks you through some of the most common methods to gain experience in the game! These options do not utilize glitches but work within the rules of standard survival gameplay. If you want to enchant or repair your items, you must have a reliable way to gain XP!

What Does XP Do in Minecraft?

Experience is largely used for enchanting, which can be used to add additional properties to your armor, tools, and weaponry. You can also use XP at anvils, which is used to repair and upgrade all of the previously mentioned items. Enchanting requires the most experience, and it also requires you to be high level to get the best enchantments. If you want to max out all of your items, you must farm up some XP.

Best Ways to Get XP in Minecraft

Here are some of the current best ways to gain XP in the game. Some of these ways can be a bit dangerous, so be sure to pick the option that best suits your style of play.

Related: Top 10 Minecraft Farms to Build in 1.19 (March 2023)

Animal Breeding

This is probably one of Minecraft's easiest and safest ways to farm up XP. However, you will need to prep by creating some Wheat and vegetable farms to have enough food to breed all the necessary animals.

Once you've got your vegetable and Wheat farm producing, you'll need to lure over at least two of each of the following animals to your base: Cows, Sheep, Pigs, and Chickens. You can use the foods listed below to lure the animals. Craft a bunch of fencing and make a square area for each animal type (with a gate), probably something like 15x15 or larger. Once you've got that done, you can start the breeding process. Each animal requires a different food to breed; here's a list of what you'll need:

• Chickens: Seeds (Wheat, Beetroot, Melon, or Pumpkin)
• Cows: Wheat
• Pigs: Carrots, Potatoes, or Beetroots
• Sheep: Wheat

Go around to each of your four different pens and breed the animals. This will start gaining you the XP you are looking for, but it will be a bit slow initially. Once you've done all four, go around and do them again and repeat this process until you receive a message that the animals can no longer breed. When you receive that message, you must go to all the pens and kill the adult animals that can no longer breed. This also gets you some additional experience! Now, you'll have to wait a bit for the baby animals to become adults. Once they do, you repeat the same process you did before. Only this time, there will be more animals, and you should gain even more XP. Keep repeating this until you have all the required experience you need!

Trading with Villagers

Trading with the local Villagers is also one of the safest ways of earning XP in Minecraft. You can construct a Villager trading hall, which will give you access to many useful items and maximize the number of villagers that can be easily reached. Each transaction with a villager will grant you six XP points. Villagers are also the best source of items in the game, so trading with them is always useful.

Mine Nether Quartz

This is obviously going to be a bit of a dangerous endeavor because you'll have to head into the Nether. If you've got the stomach for it, this is one of the fastest ways to get experience. Once you enter the Nether, look around for blocks like those in the image above. That's Nether Quartz, and mining yields 3.5 XP per block, which is the greatest amount of XP gain you can get by mining. There's quite a bit of it to be found, so harvest as much as possible and try to stay safe. Always mark your path when you are running around in the Nether because it's easy to get lost.

Slay Pigmen

This is another Nether farm, but it's a solid way to gain more XP. Find yourself a bunch of the Pigmen that make a home in the Nether. They are passive at first, but if you attack one, they'll all go after you! Stacking up at least three blocks under you is an easy way to avoid being killed. You can reach them with your sword, but they can't reach you! Shoot one with your bow to start them attacking you, and then slash away at the Pigmen until they are all dead. You might want to bring a lot of extra swords if you don't have a good diamond one.

Related: How to make a Book in Minecraft 1.19

Enderman Farm

You could view this as a glitch, so I would understand if you didn't want to pursue this method. However, it's a very good way to get a ton of experience very quickly. The problem is that you'll have to build a somewhat complicated contraption to take advantage of it. You'll also need to have been to The End and defeated the Ender Dragon. If you've fulfilled those requirements, you can watch the following video to create the farm.

Fighting Ender Dragon

To find an Ender Dragon, you must enter the End realm. They are considered the final bosses of Minecraft because they're the most dangerous mob to defeat. If you manage to kill it, you will be rewarded with an incredible 12,000 XP, which is the single biggest sum of points you can get in Minecraft without cheating. You can even re-summon the Ender Dragon by placing four end crystals on the edges of the exit portal. Re-summoned Dragon will yield less points, but it will still be worth it.

Monster Spawner Farm

You can do a monster spawner farm if you haven't gotten to The End yet. You will need to locate a monster spawning block, but once you do, you can build around it and make a pretty powerful XP farmer. This takes a fair amount of time to build, but it's worth it if you are going through a ton of experience when enchanting.

If you're looking for more Minecraft content, Pro Game Guides has your back! Check out How to find an Ancient City in Minecraft and What do horses eat in Minecraft? Answered!