Advancements: The Full Tree Explained

The advancement screen is five separate trees, and the lines between the nodes are not locks. Nothing inside a tab has to be earned in order, whole tabs stay off your screen until you trigger them, and the entire set can be handed to you or taken away with one command without a single block of your world changing. Most of the confusion around advancements comes from assuming the opposite.

The five tabs and what each one is really tracking

Every tab has a root advancement, and in normal play earning that root is what puts the tab on your screen. Strictly, the tab appears the moment you are granted anything in that tree, root or not — which is why a fresh world looks so empty and a post-Nether world suddenly looks enormous. A handful of individual advancements are hidden too: How Did We Get Here?, Arbalistic, Voluntary Exile and Hero of the Village among them do not render at all until you earn them.

Minecraft

Root: obtain a crafting table. Internally this tab is called story, and it is the survival spine — cobblestone, a stone pickaxe, a smelted iron ingot, a piece of iron armour, a lava bucket, obsidian, diamonds, a diamond chestplate, an enchanting table, a Nether portal. It finishes with Eye Spy, which needs you to follow an Eye of Ender and get inside a stronghold, and The End?, which is just stepping through. The one node people stall on is Zombie Doctor: weaken a zombie villager with a splash potion of Weakness, feed it a golden apple, wait. It is a full cure procedure rather than a one-click item pickup.

Nether

Root: enter the Nether. This is a mid-sized tab and the worst named, because two of its longest chains are not Nether content at all. The brewing chain (Local Brewery, then A Furious Cocktail, then How Did We Get Here?) sits here because blaze powder is Nether-gated. The beacon chain sits here because Withering Heights asks you to summon the Wither, which needs three wither skeleton skulls, which need a fortress. The rest is genuine Nether work: Into Fire, A Terrible Fortress, Those Were the Days, War Pigs, Hidden in the Depths and Cover Me in Debris for a full netherite set. Subspace Bubble is the outlier — travel 7 km measured in Overworld blocks using a Nether portal, so about 875 blocks of walking in the Nether.

The End

Root: enter the End. This is the smallest tab, nine nodes and no filler. Free the End is the dragon. After that the tab splits into the dragon-adjacent nodes (The Next Generation for holding the egg, You Need a Mint for bottling dragon's breath, The End... Again... for respawning her) and the gateway route: Remote Getaway, The City at the End of the Game, Sky's the Limit for finding elytra, and Great View From Up Here for riding shulker levitation 50 blocks upward.

Adventure

Root: kill any entity, or be killed by one. This is the largest tab in the game by a wide margin. It absorbs everything that is not crafting, farming or dimension progression, which means it is where almost every recent feature lands. Armour trims live here as Crafting a New Look and Smithing with Style. Sculk gave it Sneak 100 and It Spreads. Archaeology gave it Respecting the Remnants and Careful Restoration. The trial chambers added Under Lock & Key, Revaulting, Who Needs Rockets?, Blowback and Over-Overkill. The old guard is still the toughest part: Adventuring Time, Monsters Hunted, Arbalistic, Bullseye and Sniper Duel.

Husbandry

Root: eat anything edible. Farming, breeding, taming, fishing, bees, wax, axolotls, sniffers and wolves. It contains the single most expensive joke in the game, Serious Dedication, which asks you to upgrade a hoe with a netherite ingot.

What actually gates what

Two different things get called gating and only one of them is real.

Tabs are display-gated. The End tab is not on your screen until something in the End tree lands on your account, and the Nether tab is not there until something in the Nether tree does. In ordinary play that something is the root, because the root is the easiest node in the tab to trip. This is display logic, not progression logic — hand yourself a deep node with a command and the tab shows up regardless.

Nodes inside a tab are not gated by their parents. Each advancement is checked against your actions on its own, so a finished node can absolutely sit above a greyed-out one. Loot a diamond out of a village toolsmith's chest before you have ever smelted an iron ingot and Diamonds! fires anyway, with Acquire Hardware still dark above it. The reverse happens too — kill your first zombie and the Adventure root plus Monster Hunter both pop in the same second.

What genuinely gates you is the world. You cannot get Eye Spy without blaze powder and ender pearls. You cannot get Beaconator without three wither skulls and a Nether star. You cannot get Sky's the Limit without a working End portal. The tree draws those dependencies as lines, but the lines are describing the game, not enforcing it.

The advancements that actually stop people

• How Did We Get Here? A long fixed list of status effects, all ticking on you at once. Note that it is a list written into the advancement rather than a live count of every effect in the game — instantaneous effects and a few others sit outside it, and Mojang has revised the list across versions. That is exactly why you should set up next to a beacon, brew long-duration everything in advance, and read the full effect list for your own version before you start rather than halfway through.
• A Balanced Diet. Eat every edible item, including the ones that hurt you. The wall is the enchanted golden apple, which is not craftable and only appears in a small set of generated loot chests. Chorus fruit forces an End trip, pufferfish and spider eyes force you to accept the debuffs.
• Two by Two. Breed every breedable animal. Camels only spawn in desert villages and only breed with cactus. Sniffers need two sniffer eggs brushed out of suspicious sand in warm ocean ruins, hatched, then bred with torchflower seeds the sniffers themselves dig up.
• A Complete Catalogue. Tame all eleven cat variants. Ten of them roll freely from village spawns, so a large village with many beds is your farm. Black is the awkward one: a swamp hut always generates one beside the witch, and village spawns only roll black on a full moon, in villages that generated during or after world creation. Hunting down a hut is the route you can actually plan around.
• Adventuring Time. Visit every Overworld biome. Deep dark, lush caves, dripstone caves, ice spikes, mushroom fields, eroded badlands and the rarer ocean variants are the ones that turn this into a project. The list grows with each version, so check the tab in your own game rather than trusting an old list.
• Arbalistic. Five different mob types killed by one crossbow shot. Piercing IV lets a single arrow pass through enough bodies to reach the fifth, and the five must be distinct mobs, not five zombies.
• Uneasy Alliance. Kill a ghast in the Overworld. The ghast has to be there when it dies, which means walking one through a portal — build the portal frame tall and wide enough that a 4x4 ghast fits.
• Over-Overkill. Fifty hearts of damage in one mace hit. That is a very long fall plus Density levels, aimed at something that survives long enough to take it.
• Sniper Duel and Bullseye are pure distance: a skeleton killed from at least 50 metres, and a target block bullseye struck from at least 30 metres.

Bedrock achievements are a different system entirely

They look similar and behave nothing alike.

• Java advancements are stored per world. Bedrock achievements are stored on your Microsoft account and follow you between worlds and devices.
• Java advancements are a tree with five tabs and hidden roots. Bedrock achievements are a flat list tied to platform Gamerscore or trophies.
• Bedrock permanently disables achievements for a world the moment you enable cheats, run a command, or switch on certain experimental toggles. That flag never comes back off for that world. Java has no equivalent switch — cheats, commands and Creative mode do not disable anything.
• The two lists are not the same content. Plenty of Java advancements have no Bedrock equivalent and vice versa, and shared names often have different requirements.
• Java data packs can add, replace or remove advancements, including whole new tabs. Bedrock behaviour packs cannot touch achievements. If you want extra progression, installing a data pack is the Java-only route. The broader edition split is covered in the Bedrock versus Java breakdown.

Granting and revoking without breaking anything

You need cheats on, or permission level 2 on a server. In single-player, open the pause menu, choose Open to LAN and allow cheats for the session — Java does not penalise you for it.

• /advancement grant @s everything — every loaded advancement.
• /advancement grant @s only minecraft:story/mine_stone — a single advancement. Add a criterion name after the ID to tick just one requirement, which is how you fix one missing biome on Adventuring Time.
• /advancement grant @s from minecraft:nether/root — that advancement and everything below it.
• /advancement grant @s until minecraft:end/dragon_egg — that advancement and everything above it, up to the root.
• /advancement grant @s through minecraft:adventure/root — both directions.

Swap grant for revoke and every form works in reverse. The tab IDs are story, nether, end, adventure and husbandry, so the Minecraft tab's root is minecraft:story/root.

None of this touches world state. Granting Free the End does not kill the dragon. Granting The End? does not build a portal. Revoking Sky's the Limit does not remove your elytra. Advancements are a record of what you did, and the record is editable without consequence.

Two things do change. Granting fires an advancement's rewards, so a handful of them will hand you experience, and everything floods your recipe book because recipe unlocks ride the same system. Revoking and re-earning fires those rewards again, which is a mild experience exploit worth avoiding if you care about your own bookkeeping. If you only want to repair one missed advancement, use only rather than everything.

Where your progress actually lives

Each player's progress is a JSON file in the world save, under an advancements folder, named after that player's UUID. Delete the file and that player starts the tree again in that world. Copy it into another world's advancements folder under the same UUID and the progress moves with it. On a server the folder sits inside the world directory, which makes advancement state easy to back up, reset for a new season, or hand back to someone who lost it.

That file is also why the system is safe to play with. It is a log, not a load-bearing part of your world.