How to show hitboxes in Minecraft

Aakrit Sharma
Minecraft animals and characters with hitbox enabled

Every entity and object in Minecraft has a separate hitbox that affects your interaction with them. Here’s how to show hitboxes in Minecraft, how they work, and their uses.

As the name suggests, the hitbox of an object/character defines the area in which it can be hit. In shooter games like Fortnite and Apex Legends and other combat-heavy titles such as Genshin Impact and Brawlhalla, hitboxes play a major role during PvP and PvE fights.

Minecraft is no exception as every object and entity in the sandbox game has its unique hitbox. This might not seem significant in your day-to-day exploration. However, when fighting the toughest bosses like the Ender Dragon and the Wither, the knowledge of their hitboxes can be a game changer.

On that note, here’s everything to know about hitboxes in Minecraft.

Minecraft characters with their hitboxes and red line of sight

How to enable hitboxes in Minecraft

You can enable hitboxes only in Minecraft Java Edition by pressing F3 and B on the keyboard at the same time. After doing so, every entity that you’ll see will be surrounded by certain white lines that define the area they occupy and where you can hit them to deal damage.

You can also turn off hitboxes in Minecraft with the same trick. Just press F3 and B again to disable the feature.

Are hitboxes important in Minecraft?

Yes, hitboxes are important in Minecraft as they let you understand the combat mechanics of the game more deeply. After enabling hitboxes, you’ll realize that every character’s hitbox has proper edges and is quite different from their actual shape. This means that even if an entity looks like a human or a cow, the real area where you can hit them is still a box.

Many entities have areas without any hitboxes. This explains why a lot of times, your attacks do not deal damage even when it looks like your weapon hit the entity. Hence, with hitboxes enabled, you accuracy in battle can be impeccable.

The red rectangle surrounding an entity reveals its line of sight and this is another useful mechanic. You can know if sneaking up on a certain mob is possible or not because anything that is visible through this rectangle triggers the mob and prompts it to do the standard attack/movement.

Lastly, hitboxes help in identifying suffocation damage that takes place when a solid block enters an entity’s headbox.

Minecraft character able to crawl under structures because of its hitbox

Best uses of hitboxes in Minecraft

These are some of the best uses of hitboxes in Minecraf:

  • Combat – As aforementioned, your accuracy increases significantly with hitboxes as every attack you do is guaranteed to deal damage.
  • Farming – When you’re farming animal drops or even breaking blocks for material, knowing their hitboxes lets you quickly defeat the mob or break the block. In the longer run, this practice can save you hours of missed swings.
  • Line of sight- If you’re aware of the line of sight of a mob, you can come up with accurate ways to block their vision. This is primarily done by building walls.

Defeat the Ender Dragon in Minecraft with hitboxes

Not just in terms of its health and abilities, the Ender Dragon is also a unique boss for its hitboxes. Apparently, the massive dragon is surrounded by a white and a red rectangular box. However, the actual hitboxes are present in the form of several green boxes.

The green boxes occupy different parts of the Ender Dragon’s body and these are the only places from where you can expect to hurt the boss.

Minecraft Ender Dragon with hitboxes

All in all, considering that the toughest boss fight in Minecraft becomes slightly easier because of hitboxes is enough to evaluate their importance. For more such guides, check out how to turn on coordinates, how to get a command block, and how to make a name tag.

Image Credits: Mojang

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About The Author

Aakrit is a games writer with over 2000 published articles for EssentiallySports, Sportskeeda, FortniteINTEL, and CharlieINTEL. Currently, he writes guides on Minecraft, Roblox, Pokemon games, Genshin Impact, and Brawlhalla. Aakrit loves playing shooter games and in his free time, you can find him queued up in Valorant, Fortnite, Apex Legends, or Halo Infinite. You can contact Aakrit at [email protected].