Getting from level 0 to level 30 costs 1,395 experience points. Getting from 30 to 31 costs another 112 on its own. That curve is the reason enchanting feels fine early and becomes a grind later, and understanding it changes where you spend your time.
The level cost curve
Experience is stored as points. Levels are a display on top of those points, and the number of points each level costs changes in three bands.
- Levels 0 to 15: 2 × level + 7 points for the next level. Cheap – the first level costs 7.
- Levels 16 to 30: 5 × level – 38. The jump from 15 to 16 is where it starts getting expensive.
- Level 31 and up: 9 × level – 158. This band is steep and does not stop.
The practical reading: level 30 is the design target. It is where the enchanting table gives its best results, and the curve is tuned so that reaching it is an achievement and exceeding it is optional.
It also explains the common experience of losing levels 40 to 30 and barely noticing, then losing 30 to 20 and feeling it. The top ten levels of a high stack are worth far more points than the bottom ten.
Where experience actually comes from
Five sources, with very different rates.
Ores. Only some ores drop experience directly: coal, diamond, emerald, lapis, redstone and nether quartz. Iron, gold and copper drop none when mined – their experience comes from smelting. Silk Touch removes the drop entirely, which is a real cost if you are mining for levels rather than for blocks.
Smelting. The furnace stores experience while it runs and releases all of it when you collect the output. A furnace left running for an hour is a battery, and emptying it is where the points arrive.
Mobs. Most hostile mobs give 5 points. Passive animals give 1 to 3. Blazes give 10, which is why blaze farms are the standard answer for anyone who needs a lot of levels.
Breeding and fishing. Small amounts, but constant, and both are things you are doing anyway.
Villagers and bottles. Trading gives experience per transaction, and bottles of enchanting are pure stored experience that can be bought in bulk from a cleric.
Why mining is a worse XP source than it feels
A diamond ore block gives 3 to 7 points. At the high end, that is about two percent of the way from 29 to 30.
The number is small enough that mining for experience only works as a side effect of mining for materials. If levels are the goal, a mob farm produces more in ten minutes than an hour underground will, and it does so while you stand still.
The exception is early game, before any farm exists, where a cave trip produces ore experience, mob experience and the materials to build with simultaneously. That combination is why the early game feels fast and the mid game feels slow.
Storing experience
Experience cannot be put in a chest, which is the constraint that shapes everything about how players manage it.
Three workarounds. Bottles of enchanting, bought from cleric villagers, are the only true storage – throw them to convert back into points on demand. A loaded furnace holds its experience indefinitely until collected. And Mending gear converts experience directly into durability, which means carrying repaired tools is a form of spending it well.
The bottle route is the one worth setting up if you enchant frequently, because it decouples gathering levels from spending them. A trading hall makes it cheap enough to be routine.
Spending it properly
The enchanting table shows three options and takes lapis plus levels. At level 30 the top slot costs 3 levels and gives the strongest results, and enchanting below 30 is almost always a waste of lapis for gear you intend to keep.
Anvils are where levels disappear fastest. Every use of an item in an anvil raises its prior work penalty, and the cost compounds until the item becomes too expensive to work with at all. The order in which you combine books decides whether a piece of gear stays repairable – the full argument is in the anvil cost guide, and it is worth reading before your first netherite piece rather than after.
Grindstones give back a small amount of experience when removing enchantments, which makes them the correct way to strip an item you no longer want rather than throwing it away.
A working routine
- Build one experience source you can use passively – a mob farm, or a blaze farm if you have nether access.
- Keep a furnace array running on whatever you are smelting anyway and collect it in batches.
- Get a cleric villager for bottles of enchanting, so levels can be banked.
- Enchant at 30, never below, for anything you plan to keep.
- Put Mending on the tools you use constantly and stop repairing them in an anvil.
Item five is the one that changes the most. A Mending pickaxe repaired by ambient experience never enters an anvil, never accumulates a prior work penalty, and lasts indefinitely – which removes the single largest recurring experience cost in a long-running world.
Quick reference
- Level 0 to 30: 1,395 points total. Level 30 to 31 alone: 112.
- Cost bands: 2L+7 below 16, 5L-38 from 16 to 30, 9L-158 above 30.
- No experience from mining iron, gold or copper – that comes from smelting.
- Silk Touch removes ore experience entirely.
- Furnaces store experience until collected. Bottles of enchanting are the only portable storage.
Images: Os’ Colorful Grasses project gallery.