Sharpness

Sharpness is a common melee enchantment in Minecraft 1.21. Sharpness adds a flat amount of extra damage to every melee hit, no matter what you are fighting, by raising the weapon's attack damage attribute before the swing lands.

Its opening level already delivers a noticeable boost — +1 damage (+0.5 hearts) — and it climbs from there to a maximum of level 5 (V) on your sword.

Sharpness tops out at level 5, shown as V on the sword, and the gap between the levels is where the enchantment's character really lives.

The bonus follows a simple rule: the first level grants +1 damage and each level after that adds another +0.5, so Sharpness V tops out at +3 damage (one and a half hearts) on top of the weapon's base. Because the gain per level shrinks, the jump from no enchantment to Sharpness I is the most valuable single point you can spend.

Sharpness can be placed on sword and axe, giving you two choices for where it does the most good depending on how you play.

Sharpness cannot share an item with Smite, Bane of Arthropods, Density and Breach. All of these sit in the same mutually-exclusive group as Sharpness, so an item can wear only one of them at once and you choose which playstyle to commit to.

Sharpness can be rolled directly at an enchanting table, where reaching its top level of V on a sword generally wants a fully bookshelf-powered table at roughly level 11. Players who would rather not gamble for Sharpness can hunt the book down through loot chest and villager trading and apply it at an anvil.

Its selection weight of 10 makes Sharpness a common roll: it shows up frequently among the options when you enchant a sword, so building one rarely takes many tries.