Minecraft Spear Guide: Jab, Charge Damage, and Lunge

A diamond spear jabs for 4 damage in Java Edition. Hold the same spear low while flying an elytra at firework-boost speed and the Minecraft Wiki's damage table puts the hit at 37. That gap is the whole weapon: the spear's charge attack takes its damage from how fast you are moving, not from the item's stats.

Mojang revealed it at Minecraft LIVE on September 27, 2025 and shipped it on December 9, 2025 in the Mounts of Mayhem drop (Java Edition 1.21.11, Bedrock Edition 1.21.130). It also breaks several rules our combat guide lays out for melee weapons: a spear cannot land a critical hit, cannot do a sprint-knockback hit, cannot break a block, and cannot touch anything standing closer than two blocks.

Everything below is Java Edition unless it says Bedrock, with the numbers taken from the wiki's spear, Lunge and mob pages as of Java 26.3 and Bedrock 26.50.

The spear at a glance

That last-but-one row matters more than it looks. Because a spear jabs whenever you press attack, you cannot mine or clear a cobweb with it in your hand. Keep it off the slot you build from.

Crafting every tier, and what each one does

The recipe is one material and two sticks on a diagonal: material in the top-right corner, a stick in the centre, a stick bottom-left. The material is planks, a gold ingot, a stone-tier block such as cobblestone, a copper ingot, an iron ingot or a diamond. Netherite is not crafted; you upgrade a diamond spear at a smithing table with a netherite upgrade template and a netherite ingot, the same route covered in our smithing templates guide.

One material means a diamond spear costs one diamond, half what a diamond sword costs. Here is what each tier gets you:

Two things in that table are worth reading twice. The jab cooldown gets longer as the tier goes up, so a netherite spear jabs less often than a wooden one. And the copper spear jabs for the same damage as stone on a slower cooldown; the wiki notes it is strictly worse than stone for jabbing, and Mojang closed that report (MC-304382) as working as intended.

The jab: long reach, forced cooldown, no crits

The jab is the spear's attack-button move, and on its own it is weak. A diamond spear jabbing on cooldown puts out 3.81 damage per second. A diamond sword, at 7 damage and 1.6 attack speed, works out to 11.2 by the same theoretical maths in the combat guide. On foot, trading hits, the sword does roughly three times the damage.

The jab also plays by different cooldown rules from every other weapon:

• Java: a sword swung early still lands at reduced damage. A spear cannot jab at all until its attack meter is at 100%.
• Bedrock: the jab uses a use cooldown like an ender pearl, and that cooldown applies to every spear in your inventory, so hotbar-swapping between two spears does not get you a faster second jab.

What the jab buys you is space. It reaches 4.5 blocks where a sword reaches 3, it inflates the target's hitbox by 0.125 blocks so hits register more easily, it can hit several mobs in one thrust, and it goes straight through cobwebs and tall grass. The cost is the dead zone: nothing within 2 blocks of you can be hit. A zombie that gets inside that range is safe from your spear, so carry a sword or axe in the next slot for when the spacing breaks down.

The charge: your speed is the damage stat

Hold the use button and the spear lowers into a charge. It does nothing on contact unless you and the target are closing on each other fast enough, and when you are, the damage is roughly the tier's multiplier times your closing speed in blocks per second. The multipliers run 0.7 (wood, gold), 0.82 (stone, copper), 0.95 (iron), 1.075 (diamond) and 1.2 (netherite).

The speed gates are the part to memorise:

Walking is about 4.317 blocks per second, so walking into a mob with the charge lowered does nothing. Sprinting is about 5.612, which clears both the damage and knockback gates, but only when you sprint straight ahead: the wiki notes a strafing sprint does not reach the knockback threshold. Closing speed is relative, so the charge also connects when you stand still and something runs into you fast enough.

Two more rules. One charge can hit several targets, which is how you get the Mob Kabob advancement (an achievement on Bedrock): hit five mobs in the same charge. Armor stands count toward it. And per the wiki, Strength and Weakness do not currently change charge damage; the open report on that is MC-306239.

The three charge stages

A held charge does not last forever. It moves through three stages, and each one does less:

1. Engaged (spear held out steadily): damage, knockback, and it knocks riders off their mounts.
2. Tired (spear turned sideways and shaking): damage and knockback.
3. Disengaged (spear lowered to the bottom of the screen): damage only.

The dismount column is where mounts come in. The fastest possible horse runs 14.57 blocks per second, enough to clear every tier's threshold. An average horse, at 9.71 in the wiki's spear table, only clears netherite's 9. Java 26.1 made those dismount thresholds stricter to match Bedrock, leaving only the wooden spear's unchanged.

Charge damage by how fast you are moving

The wiki works the multiplier through for common ways of moving. These are Java figures, in health points:

That bottom row is the spear's real ceiling. Mojang's own reveal article told players to try it "wearing elytra" and in a minecart, and at firework-boost speed a netherite spear charge lands 41, which is more than double the 20-point health bar of an unarmored player. If you already fly with rockets, our elytra guide covers the flight half; a horse bred for speed, per the horses guide, is the ground version.

Higher tiers are not strictly better

With the spear, a higher tier is a trade rather than a straight upgrade:

• Higher tiers win on: jab damage, charge multiplier, a faster activation delay (0.4 seconds on netherite against 0.75 on wood), and a lower speed needed to dismount.
• Higher tiers lose on: a slower jab cooldown, a shorter charge overall (8.75 seconds on netherite against 15 on wood), and a shorter engaged window, which drops from 5 seconds on wood to 2.5 on iron and netherite. Once the engaged stage ends, the charge stops dismounting riders; once the tired stage ends, it stops knocking anything back.

So a wooden spear can hold its knockback charge for 10 seconds where a netherite one manages 5.5. For a long ride toward a target, a low-tier spear keeps its knockback longer; for a short, fast strike, netherite hits harder and comes up sooner.

Jab then charge: the damage loop

The jab and the charge run on separate timers, and a charge can be started while the jab is on cooldown. Alternate them and you roughly double your attack rate. The wiki calculates the combined output for a player sprinting into a target:

Two honest caveats. The figure assumes you keep sprinting at the target the whole time while staying outside the 2-block dead zone, which is a best case rather than a fight. And even at its best, netherite's 10.43 sits under a diamond sword's 11.2. What the table does show is how flat the middle is: a stone spear at 9.33 is within 2% of a diamond spear at 9.52 on this loop, because diamond's slow jab cooldown eats its damage lead. In Bedrock there is a delay of several ticks after a jab before a charge can start (MCPE-233837, unresolved), so the loop is slower there.

Lunge: a jab that throws you forward

Lunge is the spear-only enchantment, max level III. Every jab with a Lunge spear pushes you horizontally forward:

Each lunge also costs 1 durability, and the hunger cost comes out of saturation first, then the hunger bar; our food and hunger guide covers why saturation runs out before you notice. Lunge refuses to fire in four situations: while you are riding anything, gliding on an elytra, touching water, or when your hunger bar is below 7 points, which is the same line below which you can no longer sprint. On Peaceful, where hunger does not drain, it only costs durability.

Three details that make it better than it reads:

• It goes further in midair. Jump, then jab.
• Look level. The vertical part of the push is cancelled, so aiming up or down only shortens the lunge.
• It feeds the charge. Jab to lunge, then immediately lower the spear, and the charge uses the lunge's speed. That is where the Lunge rows in the damage table come from. You need distance for it, because the charge's activation delay has to finish before you reach the target.

Because a lunge fires on every jab, lower tiers can lunge more often: a wooden spear manages about 1.54 lunges a second, netherite about 0.87.

Every enchantment a spear can take

Everything except Mending and Curse of Vanishing can come off an enchanting table; Lunge books also turn up from librarians, fishing and structure loot. The enchanting setup guide covers the table itself. Repairs work the usual way at an anvil: each unit of the tier's material restores 25% of max durability, and combining two same-tier spears keeps the enchantments, as our anvil guide explains.

One Java trap: a spear in your offhand can still charge, but its enchantments do not apply to that charge. Sharpness, Fire Aspect, Looting and Knockback all fail there. On Mojang's bug tracker the Knockback report (MC-304406) is still open, and the Sharpness and Fire Aspect/Looting reports (MC-308270, MC-308272) were closed as duplicates of the long-open MC-3304.

Where to find spears without crafting

Crafting is cheap enough that loot is a bonus, but the loot tables are generous and two of them hand out pre-enchanted diamond spears:

Bedrock matches those odds except in the bastion treasure chest, where both diamond rows are 16.6%. The abandoned camp rows are new with Wilderness Bound, covered in our Wilderness Bound guide; the bastion and end city chests are in the bastion guide and the end cities guide, and the buried treasure chest in the buried treasure guide.

Mobs drop the spears they carry at 8.5%, plus 1% per level of Looting to a maximum of 11.5%. Two other routes: curing a zombie villager that holds an iron spear drops the spear on the ground, and a piglin will swap its golden spear for a crossbow or sword you throw near it, if you can grab the spear before it does.

Mobs that carry spears

Zombies, husks, zombie villagers, piglins and zombified piglins with spears do not jab. They charge: they lower the spear while moving at you, hold it through all three stages, then walk away to get distance and turn for another pass. If one of those charges hits a neutral or hostile mob other than a goat, that mob turns on the attacker. Any other mob holding a spear, such as a skeleton, jabs at melee range instead.

The two jockeys are the ones worth planning around. Zombie horsemen spawn on grass in plains, sunflower plains, snowy plains and the savanna biomes, at light level 0 in Java, and burn in daylight. Camel husk jockeys are a husk with a spear and a parched passenger on a camel husk, spawning rarely in deserts at night or in thunderstorms. A zombie horse turns passive once its rider is gone and can then be tamed. A camel husk only turns passive once both riders are gone, because the parched takes control when the husk is knocked off. The engaged stage of your own charge, fast enough for your tier, is the tool for separating them.

On the Nether side, spear-carrying piglins are one more reason to wear gold before you go near them, per our piglin bartering guide.

Java vs Bedrock: the delta list

Bedrock charge attacks also throw critical-hit particles when they land, but the wiki is explicit that they are not critical hits. One Java-only oddity the wiki documents: both spear attacks can knock primed TNT sideways, which no other weapon does. The charge-damage tables above are Java figures; the wiki flags Bedrock's charge speed requirements as not yet fully documented.

Quick Action Checklist

• Craft stone first. One cobblestone and two sticks, and on the jab-then-charge loop it is within 2% of diamond.
• Never walk into a charge. Walking is 4.317 blocks per second; the charge needs 4.6 to do anything. Sprint straight, ride, lunge or fly.
• Keep a sword or axe in the next slot. The spear cannot hit anything within 2 blocks and cannot crit.
• Alternate jab and charge instead of spamming either one; the timers are separate.
• Put Lunge on it and jab level, from midair, with at least 7 hunger points.
• Pick the tier for the job: low tiers for long knockback charges and frequent lunges, netherite for the biggest single hit.
• Take it on an elytra. At firework-boost speed a netherite charge lands 41.
• Check weaponsmith chests and bastion treasure rooms for free spears, including enchanted diamond ones.
• On Java, keep enchanted spears in the main hand; offhand charges ignore enchantments.