Minecraft wiki entry for Things_not_to_do, associated text: As the player's experience level rises past a certain point, the experience orbs the player collects count less toward the next level each time they level up. In other words, each level takes more and more experience to fill up. Since the player can never enchant anything at a level higher than 30, they should make sure to enchant as soon as possible as otherwise, the player wastes much of the experience that they gained after that point. Even worse, if the player dies, they lose the majority of their experience permanently. For example, when the player first defeats the ender dragon, they receive 12,000 experience points, which is enough to bring their experience level from zero up to level 68. This is a high amount of experience, but a large portion of this experience is wasted because so much of it is used to achieve higher experience levels.