Enchantment Descriptions | See What Every Enchant Does

If you're the player who keeps a wiki tab open on the second monitor just to remember what Lure does to a fishing rod, this mod removes that step. Enchantment Descriptions is a lightweight client-side mod by Darkhax that puts a short, plain explanation of each enchantment's effects on the tooltip of enchanted books and enchanted gear. Hover the item, read the line, and get back to the table while the plan is still fresh. It has picked up around 40 million downloads, it ships inside RLCraft, one of the biggest hardcore packs around, and it still gets updates as of September 2026.

Enchantment explanations right on the tooltip

Once installed, any enchanted item in your inventory shows a brief description of its enchantment effects under the name and level. All vanilla enchantments come with text out of the box, so a level three numeral stops being a memory test. Most modded enchantments are supported as well, which the next section covers.

The descriptions are localized in over 13 languages, and the author's documentation now puts that figure at 15 or more, including Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and French. Non-English players get the same benefit without translating anything themselves.

Performance is another common question. The author bills the mod as lightweight, and the scope fits the label: its whole job is adding text to tooltips when you hover. No public benchmark data exists, so the strongest claim we can make is that it's a small, focused client-side tweak.

Custom descriptions through lang files

The text this mod displays is pulled from the game's localization map. The key format is enchantment.%MOD_ID%.%ENCH_ID%.desc, which means adding or editing a description is as simple as placing the right entry in a lang file. Pack authors can ship their own text with a resource pack, which is handy for rebalanced or fully custom pack enchantments that vanilla tooltips never explain.

Most enchantment mods already include support by writing those entries themselves. That covers everything from small perks to big custom lists like the boss-tier enchants in Ultimate Enchantment and the additions in Alessandrv's Enchantments. If an enchantment you enjoy shows up without any text, the author asks you to flag it on the project's GitHub issue tracker rather than assume the mod is broken. Recent versions can also generate a fallback description from an enchantment's registered data when no entry exists, so a blank line is rare.

Look up enchants with JEI, REI, or EMI

A recipe viewer turns this mod into something searchable. Type an enchantment into JEI, REI, or EMI, open the enchanted book entry, and the description text shows up in the information panel right there. You can cross-check half a dozen enchants in a minute without leaving the game, which beats tabbing out mid-anvil-session to read a wiki page.

Between tooltips and the viewer, planning a loadout becomes something you do inside the game instead of something you wiki after the fact.

How to install Enchantment Descriptions

This is a client-side mod, so you install it on the machine you play on. Servers get optional support, but a plain client install is everything a player needs, and it won't keep you out of multiplayer.

1. Set up a mod loader if you haven't already. Builds are published for Fabric, Forge, NeoForge, and Quilt. If loaders are new to you, our Forge guide walks through the classic loader.
2. Download the file that matches your loader from the official project page.
3. Drop the jar into your mods folder, creating the folder first if it doesn't exist.
4. Start the game with the loader profile you set up.
5. Hover any enchanted book in your inventory to confirm the description lines are showing.

One quirk to know about: on Fabric, very long tooltips can run off the edge of the screen. That's a known vanilla rendering bug, not a fault of this mod, and the fix is simply adding ToolTipFix to your mods folder alongside it. Forge and NeoForge ship a built-in fix for that bug, so you won't hit it on those loaders.

Enchantment Descriptions FAQ

Does Enchantment Descriptions need to be on the server?

No. The client requires it and the server does not. It renders tooltip text locally, so it plays fine in multiplayer, including on servers running without it.

Can I show descriptions only on enchanted books?

Yes. Open the config file enchdesc.json and set onlyDisplayOnBooks to true. Enchanted gear drops the extra lines and books keep them, and the config has other options if you want finer control.

Does it work with modded enchantments?

Yes. Many enchantment mods ship their own description entries, and any that don't can be requested through the project's GitHub issue tracker.

Is Enchantment Descriptions still maintained?

Yes, the project is active. The most recent update landed in September 2026, and translation work has kept coming in as well.

Between the tooltip text this mod adds and the roll previews covered in our Enchantment Reveal guide, you can know both what you're about to roll and what each enchant does once it lands. Grab the right build from the official project page and you're set.