Whether players just want to spruce up their home, improve their equipment, or build a library to circumvent internet censorship, there are plenty of reasons to build a bookshelf in Minecraft. Thankfully, they're not difficult to make. Bookshelves have an intuitive recipe and they only need common ingredients. Once a player knows how they work and where to get the component parts, they're well on their way to constructing their own Library of Alexandria.
Aside from making a room feel a bit more distinguished, bookshelves in Minecraft improve the player's enchanting ability. Each nearby bookshelf levels up the player's enchanting table, up to level 15. And the stronger the table, the better the enchantment. For example, the Feather Fall boot enchantment reduces fall damage. At level 1, this enchantment only reduces 12% of the expected damage. At its max level, Feather Fall reduces 48% of the expected damage. The sword enchantment Knockback, as the name suggests, knocks enemies back when hit. At level 1, it pushes enemies 3 blocks away. When leveled up, Knockback pushes them 6 blocks away.
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As a bonus feature, placing a bookshelf under a note block gives the block a low bass sound. This can be useful for any aspiring Minecraft composers who want to give their songs some more depth.
The recipe for bookshelves is easy to remember. At a crafting table, the player makes two lines of wood planks on the top and bottom row, and a row of books sandwiched between them. Planks can be made from tree logs or huge fungi stems from the Nether. Books in Minecraft can be made with paper and leather, but they can also be found searching through chests, trading with librarian villagers, or destroying village bookshelves.
While destroying a bookshelf with standard tools just yields books, using a tool enchanted with Silk Touch allows the player to take the entire bookshelf in one piece. Those trying to make an enchanting room quickly, or rearrange shelves without re-crafting them, should invest in this enchantment.
While Minecraft's bookshelves have multiple uses, they, unfortunately, can't do the one thing real bookshelves are used for: storing books. The books used when crafting it are no longer accessible, and the player has to destroy the bookshelf to retrieve them. For most books, this isn't a problem, but players should be careful that they don't use enchanted books or custom books while building. While it's not as exciting as new biomes or enemies, hopefully Mojang Studios will make the contents of bookshelves readable in a future update.
Minecraft is available on Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.