~11 min
A sword is the first real weapon most players craft, made from a stick plus two units of one material: wood, gold, stone, iron, diamond, or netherite. Material decides base damage: wooden and golden swords deal 4 damage per hit, stone deals 5, iron deals 6, diamond deals 7, and netherite tops the list at 8. Durability climbs even faster than damage between tiers — an iron sword lasts for roughly 250 hits before breaking, while a diamond sword lasts well over a thousand.
Gold sits in an odd spot here: it deals the same damage as wood despite being harder to come by, and its durability is actually the lowest of any tier. What gold swords lose in fighting power, though, they make up for in how easily they take enchantments — a trade-off that matters more once you're enchanting gear than it does on your first night.
Every sword also has an attack speed, and for every material in Java Edition that number is the same: 1.6, meaning your weapon takes about 0.625 seconds to fully recharge between hits. The damage numbers above are what a fully-charged swing deals — swing again before that charge finishes, and the hit lands for less than full damage, scaled down by how much of the recharge you actually waited out.
This makes rapid clicking a worse strategy than it looks. Spamming hits as fast as possible mostly produces a string of partial-damage swings instead of full ones, and against a tough mob that can mean several extra hits just to make up for damage you gave away by not waiting.
Two more tools are worth knowing early. A critical hit, landed by attacking while falling such as jumping and swinging on the way down, deals extra damage on top of the normal hit, roughly one and a half times the base amount. It costs nothing to set up beyond timing, so it's worth using whenever a fight lets you.
A shield is the other side of combat: crafted from an iron ingot and six wooden planks, it goes in your off-hand slot, and raising it (right-click and hold, in Java Edition) blocks 100% of the damage from any attack coming from the direction you're facing, including melee hits and arrows. The trade-off is movement: you slow down while it's raised, and an axe hit against a raised shield has a chance to disable it for a few seconds. Used well, a shield turns an early-game fight with barely any armor into something very survivable — block the swing, then hit back once it's safe.
No — most of those hits land before the attack meter finishes recharging, so each one deals less than the full listed damage. Waiting out the full 0.625-second charge between swings is what gets you the full number.