How to Get a Mace in Minecraft: Heavy Core, Vault Odds, Recipe and Enchantments

The mace is the only weapon in Minecraft whose damage scales with how far you fall before you hit, and it is also the only weapon gated behind a 7.5% drop. Most guides stop at "combine a heavy core and a breeze rod" — which is true, and useless if you do not know where the heavy core comes from or how many vaults you should expect to open. This guide walks the whole path in order: find a trial chamber, earn the right key, open the right vault, craft the mace, and put the three mace-only enchantments on it — with the real odds at every step, read straight from the Java 26.2 loot tables and current for Java 26.2 / Bedrock 1.26.40.

What do you need to craft a mace?

A mace is crafted from one heavy core and one breeze rod — put the heavy core in a crafting grid with the breeze rod directly below it and you get one mace. That is the entire recipe, as of Java 26.2 / Bedrock 1.26.40, and it is the same in both editions. The catch is that both ingredients exist only inside trial chambers, and one of them is locked behind an ominous vault.

Ingredient	Where it comes from	Odds	Notes
Heavy Core	Vault (ominous only) in Trial Chambers	7.5% per ominous vault	Cannot be crafted. Not in any chest. The only bottleneck.
Breeze Rod	Dropped by Breeze	1–2 per kill, 4–8 with Looting III	Breezes spawn only from trial spawners.
Ominous Trial Key	Ejected by a completed ominous trial spawner	30% per completed spawner	Unlocks the ominous vault. You need Trial Omen to make a spawner ominous in the first place.
Trial Key	Ejected by a completed normal trial spawner	50% per completed spawner	Opens normal vaults only — no heavy core in those.

How do you get a heavy core?

You get a heavy core by unlocking an ominous vault in a trial chamber with an ominous trial key — it drops at 7.5% per vault and there is no other survival source. Ominous vaults are the ones surrounded by red candles and red glazed terracotta, and they only open with the ominous key; a normal trial key does nothing to them. Because each player can unlock a given vault only once, the practical grind is: open every ominous vault in a chamber, then move to the next chamber.

1. Find a trial chamber. They generate in every Overworld biome except the deep dark, with the entrance room between Y -40 and Y -20. Enter your seed in the Trial Chamber Finder and it marks every chamber with coordinates — no strip-mining at deepslate level.
2. Get Bad Omen. Drink an ominous bottle — a raid captain (a pillager or illusioner carrying the banner) that is not in a raid always drops one, and normal vaults eject them too. Bad Omen lasts 100 minutes, so you can drink it before you leave home.
3. Let a spawner see you. When a trial spawner spots a player with Bad Omen, the effect becomes Trial Omen for 15 minutes × your Bad Omen level, and every trial spawner within 15 blocks with line of sight turns ominous. Ominous trials spawn tougher mobs and lob potions and projectiles at you.
4. Clear the ominous spawner. When it finishes, it ejects rewards — 30% of the time that is an ominous trial key. A spawner then rests for 30 minutes before it can run again (a normal spawner already on cooldown skips the cooldown when it turns ominous).
5. Open the ominous vault. Right-click the red-candle vault with the ominous key. It ejects 2 to 5 stacks; a heavy core is one of them 7.5% of the time.

Here are the notable rewards an ominous vault can give you (the rest of each unlock is common loot such as emeralds, arrows and wind charges), as of Java 26.2 — the same odds the Flow armor trim comes from. Each number is the chance per vault unlock:

Ominous vault reward	Chance per vault	Why
Flow Armor Trim	22.5%	Unique pool (fires 75% of the time), weight 3 of 10
Enchanted Golden Apple	22.5%	Unique pool, weight 3 of 10
Flow Banner Pattern	15.0%	Unique pool, weight 2 of 10
Heavy Core	7.5%	Unique pool, weight 1 of 10
Lena Raine - Creator (music disc)	7.5%	Unique pool, weight 1 of 10
Wind Burst book	5.5%	Rare pool (80%), weight 2 of 29
Breach book	2.75%	Shares one rare-pool entry with Density
Density book	2.75%	Shares one rare-pool entry with Breach

How many vaults is that, really?

At 7.5% per vault you have a 54% chance of at least one heavy core after 10 ominous vaults, and 79% after 20. The number to plan around is about 13 vaults per core on average — so if a chamber has three or four ominous vaults, budget three or four chambers. Our catalog page for the heavy core shows the same loot slot as a 10% figure: that is the chance once the unique pool fires, and the pool fires 75% of the time — 10% × 0.75 = 7.5%.

How do you get breeze rods?

Kill a breeze — every breeze drops 1–2 breeze rods, and Looting raises the maximum to 4–8 at Looting III. Breezes spawn only from trial spawners in trial chambers (never naturally), have 30 HP, and fight by hopping around the room firing wind charges that shove you rather than hurt you (1 damage on Easy and Normal, 1.5 on Hard). Because you need a chamber for the heavy core anyway, you will pick up rods on the same trip; the trial spawner that spawns breezes is usually in its own room, and you need only one rod per mace. Keep the spares — breeze rods are also the mace's repair material.

How does the mace's smash attack work?

A smash attack happens automatically when you hit a mob after falling at least 1.5 blocks: the mace deals its base 6 damage plus 4 extra per block for the first 3 blocks fallen, 2 per block for the next 5, then 1 per block after that, cancels your fall damage, and knocks back every entity within 2.5 blocks. Fall 3 blocks and a plain mace already hits for 18; fall 8 and it hits for 28, before any enchantment. A successful smash also resets your fall height, which is what makes Wind Burst chains possible.

Mace stat	Java 26.2	Bedrock 1.26.40
Base attack damage	6	6
Attack speed	0.6 (one full swing every 1.67 s)	No attack cooldown
Smash attack trigger	Fall of 1.5 blocks or more	Fall of 1.5 blocks or more
Smash bonus damage	+4/block (blocks 1–3), +2/block (blocks 4–8), +1/block after	+4/block (blocks 1–3), +2/block (blocks 4–8), +1/block after
Fall damage on a landed smash	None	None
Knockback radius	2.5 blocks	2.5 blocks
Durability	500	501
Repair item	Breeze Rod (25% each)	Breeze Rod (25% each)

Where do Density, Breach and Wind Burst come from?

Density and Breach come from the enchanting table, librarian trades, fishing and vault books; Wind Burst comes only from ominous vaults, at 5.5% per vault. Those are the three enchantments that exist only for the mace. Density, Breach, Smite and Bane of Arthropods are mutually exclusive, so you pick one damage path. Which one to pick — and the full ranking with Fire Aspect, Unbreaking and Mending — is in our best enchantments guide; this table is about where each one comes from.

Enchantment	Max level	What it does	Enchanting table	Librarian trade	Ominous vault
Density	V	+0.5 smash damage per block fallen, per level (+2.5/block at V)	Yes	Yes	2.75% per vault
Breach	IV	Ignores 15% of the target's armor per level (60% at IV)	Yes	Yes	2.75% per vault
Wind Burst	III	Launches you about 8 / 16 / 24 blocks up after a smash — the fall for your next smash	No	No	5.5% per vault — the only source

Wind Burst is rarer than it looks: 5.5% is the chance of a Wind Burst I book. Vault books are always level I, so getting to Wind Burst III means finding three more books and combining them on an anvil (I + I makes II, II + II makes III) — it never comes from the table or a villager. And note that Wind Burst does not cancel fall damage on its own; only the landed smash does, so a missed swing at the top of a 24-block bounce hurts.

Is the mace different on Java and Bedrock?

The path to a mace is the same on both editions — heavy core from an ominous vault, breeze rod from a breeze, same recipe — and the ominous-vault odds have been identical since Bedrock 1.21.2, when Bedrock's vault probabilities were changed to match Java. The differences are in how the weapon swings: Bedrock has no attack cooldown, so the mace's 0.6 attack speed only exists on Java, and Bedrock's durability is 501 to Java's 500. The mace, heavy core and breeze all arrived in Java 1.21 / Bedrock 1.21.0, so any world on an older version has no trial chambers to loot.

That is the whole route: chamber → Bad Omen → ominous spawner → ominous key → red-candle vault → 7.5% → mace. The odds are what they are, but the searching part is optional — open the seed map, and every trial chamber in your world is already on it.