Taking Inventory: Crossbow

Fighting in melee is a dangerous game. You have a wide range of weapons, sure, but so does your assailant and how can you be sure that you’ll come out on top? I’ve always thought that the smart move is to fight from a distance instead. 

Minecraft only has a handful of ranged weapons - the most obvious is the bow. The least obvious is the trident. And in the middle? You’ve got our item of the month – the handy crossbow.

Crossbows were added to Minecraft in the Village & Pillage update in April 2019. You can craft one, using sticks, string, iron, and a tripwire hook. Or you can steal one from a dead pillager or piglin, though the chance of it being in good working order is fairly slim. They’re also occasionally found in chests in pillager outposts and bastion remnants, and you can sometimes buy one from a fletcher in a village.

Crossbows work similarly to bows in that you put arrows in and pain comes out the other end. They take longer to load than a bow does, but they’re more powerful and the arrow will fire farther and with more accuracy. You can even load one with a firework rocket if you want to.

To load a crossbow, hit the use button while holding it – it takes a little over a second. Once it’s fully loaded, you can put it away for later, or fire it immediately with another click of the use button. If you hit something, it’ll take an average of nine points of damage (or four and a half hearts).

Crossbows can be repaired in an anvil or grindstone, and they can also be enchanted – some enchants make the reload speed faster, some make a crossbow fire multiple arrows at once, and some make arrows pierce through enemies. Finally, if you’ve had enough of your crossbow, you can use it as fuel in a furnace – smelting 1.5 items per crossbow.

In the real world, the crossbow dates back further than you probably think – all the way back to 650BC, when bronze crossbows were used in what is now China.  They started appearing in Europe a couple of hundred years later, used by the Greeks and Romans.

Today crossbows are still used for hunting and occasionally in scientific research to collect tissue samples from animals. They’re no longer used in warfare, but they have some niche uses in the case of establishing zip lines and grappling hooks and among special forces units.

Honestly, it’s a pretty great choice in Minecraft too. Get yourself a crossbow and try it out – but don’t get caught reloading when a creeper is bearing down on you...