How to Get a Trident in Minecraft: Drowned Drop Rates

You can’t craft a trident. You have to kill a drowned that’s holding one and hope it drops, or get lucky with a trial chamber vault. Drowned with tridents are uncommon and the drop chance is low on Java, so getting one usually means either a lot of night hunting in rivers and oceans or building a farm.

From drowned

Drowned are the underwater zombie variant. Look for them in rivers and oceans at night, or in any dark water. One with a trident is easy to spot: it holds the trident above its head and throws it at you from range, which hurts.

The numbers:

• About 6.25% of naturally spawned drowned (roughly 1 in 16) carry a trident.
• When you kill one, it drops the trident 8.5% of the time on Java and 25% on Bedrock.
• Looting adds 1 percentage point per level.

So on Java you might kill a dozen trident-holders before one drops. On Bedrock it’s closer to one in four. Either way, the kill has to be yours (or your tamed wolf’s).

Zombies that drown and turn into drowned never carry tridents, so a zombie-conversion farm won’t help. For a reliable supply, build a drowned farm in a river.

Hunting tips

• Fight from a boat or a block above the water. Drowned are slow to reach you there, and you can see trident throwers coming.
• A thrown trident deals 8 damage, so wear armor and bring a shield.
• Check every drop. Tridents dropped by drowned come with random durability, so a chewed-up one still counts.

From trial chambers

Normal vaults in trial chambers have a small chance, about 2%, to give a trident when you open them with a trial key. It’s not something to plan around, but if you’re clearing trial chambers anyway it’s a nice surprise.

What it does

A trident works as both a melee weapon and a throwing weapon:

• Melee: 9 damage, slightly more than an iron sword.
• Thrown: 8 damage. Hold the use button to charge, then release. Without Loyalty you have to go and pick it up again.
• Durability: 250 on Java, 251 on Bedrock.

Its enchantments are what make it special:

• Loyalty makes it fly back after you throw it.
• Riptide launches you forward when you throw it while in water or rain. You can’t throw a Riptide trident normally, and Riptide can’t go on the same trident as Loyalty or Channeling.
• Channeling calls lightning on the mob you hit during a thunderstorm. It’s the easiest way to make a charged creeper or turn a pig into a zombified piglin on purpose.
• Impaling adds damage against aquatic mobs.

The best trident enchantments page compares the two main builds (Loyalty and Channeling versus Riptide). Many players end up keeping two tridents for that reason.

Repairing

Tridents from drowned often have low durability. Combine two on an anvil to merge their durability and keep the enchantments, or put Mending on one so XP repairs it as you play.