Damage
Damage is a whole number of health points taken off an entity.
Health
A player has 20 health, drawn as ten hearts, and dies at 0. Healing never takes a player above 20.
Health regenerates only on Peaceful, at 1 point per second.
Eating restores the food's own healing value at any difficulty.
Environmental damage
| Source | Damage | Attempted |
|---|---|---|
| Falling | ceil(distance − 3) | on landing |
| Suffocating inside a solid block | 1 | every tick |
| Touching a cactus | 1 | every tick |
| Standing in fire or lava | 1 | every tick |
| Standing in lava | 4 | every tick |
| Burning | 1 | every 20 ticks |
| Drowning | 2 | 320 ticks after the head goes under, then every 20 |
| Below Y = −64 | 4 | every tick |
| Struck by lightning | 5 | on the strike |
Repeating sources land far less often than they are attempted, because the invulnerability window discards most of the attempts.
Fall distance is reset by entering water and by holding a ladder, so neither leads to fall damage. A cobweb slows a fall but does not reset it.
A player riding a minecart, boat or pig takes the vehicle's fall damage, because a vehicle passes its fall on to its rider.
Catching fire
Standing in fire sets a mob alight for 300 ticks, and lightning does the same. A player catches alight only after 20 ticks in fire, and lightning never sets a player alight. Lava sets any entity alight for 600.
The count holds while the entity stands in the flame, and starts falling only once it leaves.
An entity standing in water or in rain does not catch, and getting wet while alight puts it out. It takes the contact damage either way.
Fire, lava and lightning do no damage to a ghast or a pig zombie. Both still catch alight, and burn off four times as fast.
Weapons
| Tool | Wood | Gold | Stone | Iron | Diamond |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sword | 4 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Axe | 3 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
| Pickaxe | 2 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Shovel | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Gold deals the damage of wood. Every other item, and a bare hand, deals 1.
Attacking while moving downwards adds 1 damage.
A sword loses 1 durability per hit and a tool loses 2. Anything else loses none.
Mob attacks
| Mob | Damage |
|---|---|
| Giant | 50 |
| Zombie, pig zombie | 5 |
| Slime | its size, 2 or 4 |
| Spider, monster | 2 |
| Wolf | 2, or 4 when tamed |
A melee mob strikes once every 20 ticks and only within 2 blocks. A wolf bites within 1.5 blocks and a slime damages on contact, and neither has a cooldown: only the invulnerability window spaces their hits. The smallest slime deals nothing at all.
A skeleton shoots an arrow every 30 ticks instead of striking. Arrows deal a flat 4 whether shot by a skeleton, a bow or a dispenser.
A creeper and a ghast deal no direct damage; both explode. A ghast's fireball hits for 0 and leaves the damage to its blast.
Snowballs, eggs and a fishing bobber deal 0 damage. They still knock a mob back, but do nothing to a player.
Explosions
An explosion damages every entity within twice its size in blocks, by up to 16 × size + 1 at the centre, and less with distance and cover.
The invulnerability window
Taking damage makes an entity invulnerable for 10 ticks. A source that fires during that window is ignored unless it exceeds the damage that opened the window, and then only the difference is applied.
Hits of 2 and then 5 inside one window therefore cost 5 health, not 7.
A hit taken this way does not restart the window, which keeps running from the hit that opened it. It also passes without knockback, hurt sound or hurt flash, and kills silently if it kills.
Armour
Armour points depend on the slot alone, never on the material.
| Piece | Points |
|---|---|
| Chestplate | 8 |
| Leggings | 6 |
| Helmet | 3 |
| Boots | 3 |
Armour is worn by placing it in the inventory's four armour slots, helmet at the top and boots at the bottom. Each slot takes only its own piece, and the top slot also takes a pumpkin, which gives no points. Using a piece of armour does not put it on.
Each point removes 4% of the damage, so a full set of any material removes 80%. The reduced figure is rounded down, and the remainder is carried into the next hit rather than lost.
Armour reduces every kind of damage, drowning, suffocation, fire and falling included.
Damaged armour protects less. The point total is scaled by the durability left across all worn pieces together, down to a floor of 1 point.
Every worn piece loses durability equal to the damage before reduction, whatever the source. A 25-damage blast costs each piece 25 durability.
Materials differ only in durability:
| Piece | Leather | Gold | Chain | Iron | Diamond |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Helmet | 33 | 66 | 66 | 132 | 264 |
| Chestplate | 48 | 96 | 96 | 192 | 384 |
| Leggings | 45 | 90 | 90 | 180 | 360 |
| Boots | 39 | 78 | 78 | 156 | 312 |
Difficulty
Damage a player takes from a zombie, pig zombie, spider, giant, skeleton arrow or creeper explosion is scaled by the difficulty setting.
| Difficulty | Damage taken |
|---|---|
| Peaceful | 0 |
| Easy | damage / 3 + 1 |
| Normal | damage |
| Hard | damage × 3 / 2 |
Slimes, wolves and ghasts fall outside the scaling, and so do TNT, bed and fireball explosions. An arrow from a dispenser falls outside it too, having no shooter to test.
Mobs deal and take unscaled damage among themselves.
Knockback
An attacker knocks its target back by a fixed amount, the same for a punch as for a diamond sword. Damage with no attacker behind it knocks nothing back.
Death
An entity that reaches 0 health drops its items at once and disappears 20 ticks later.
Other entities
Minecarts and boats hold a damage counter instead of health. Each hit adds ten times the damage and the counter falls by 1 per tick; the vehicle breaks above 40.
A dropped item has 5 health and is destroyed by fire and explosions. Any damage breaks a painting, which drops as an item. The item a blast knocks off survives that blast.