To scale against a player, from the same client model.
What you need
The insomnia counter, as odds
There is no switch that flips at three nights. Every attempt to spawn a phantom near you rolls a random number under your current sleepless-tick count and checks whether it lands at or above 72,000 (exactly 3 in-game days at 24,000 ticks each). Below 72,000 sleepless ticks that check can never pass, so the odds are a flat zero. Past it, the odds climb the longer you go without sleeping, they never jump straight to certain.
JavaThe game checks this roughly every 60 to 119 real seconds, for every player who is in a sky-lit dimension, at or above sea level, and can see the open sky.
A bed resets it the instant you climb in, not after you have slept the night through. Dying resets the same counter too, which is not exactly a strategy but is a real side effect of respawning.
JavaClimbing into bed resets the counter as the very first thing that happens, before anything else about going to sleep runs. Dying resets the same counter as well.
When one does spawn, it rarely comes alone once the odds are already climbing: group size scales with difficulty, 1 to 2 on Easy, 1 to 3 on Normal, 1 to 4 on Hard.
JavaAll of them arrive together in the same spawn tick, not one at a time.
Dodge the swoop, then sleep
Phantoms only spawn after three nights awake, and each one has just 20 HP. Strafe out of the diving swoop, shoot it down with a bow or sword on the pass, and stay under a roof or near a cat. The real fix is a bed: one night's sleep resets the timer and stops them entirely.
- 1Watch for the swoopPhantoms circle overhead, then dive in a steep arc to hit you for up to 6 damage before peeling off for another pass.
- 2Strafe the diveSidestep as it commits to the dive; the swoop is committed and easy to dodge once you read the angle, then it climbs and re-circles.
- 3Shoot it downEach phantom has only 20 HP, so a couple of bow shots or two clean sword hits on the pass kills it. Loose your arrow as it dives at you.
- 4Stand under coverA roof, a tree, or a cat nearby stops the swoop. Cats scare phantoms off, and they cannot dive through a solid block above you.
- 5Sleep to end itSleep in a bed to clear the insomnia. Three nights awake is what spawns them, so a good night's sleep stops phantoms entirely.
How high it circles
Set directly as one number on the circling behavior itself: how high above you it holds while it waits to dive.
Set directly in the circling behavior itself, as one fixed number.
No single circling-height number exists. It spawns 20 to 34 blocks above you, then only wobbles a few blocks around that point while it circles.
Comes from its spawn height plus a small random wobble while it circles.
Different mechanics, same result for you: it holds well above roof height until it commits to a dive. That is why one layer of blocks over your head already stops it, on either edition, without needing to know the exact number above you at any given moment.
JavaJava re-anchors mid-circle too: if the block above or below its target point turns solid, it nudges its circling height back toward you so it does not try to circle through your roof.
The 16-block cat zone
On Bedrock, one tamed cat or ocelot anywhere within 16 blocks keeps every phantom away, and it does not need to be visible: ignore_visibility: true means a cat behind a wall still counts. One cat asleep in your base is a real, standing fix.
BedrockConfirmed in Bedrock's own behavior files, filtered to the cat and ocelot family, and it applies whether or not the cat can actually be seen.
On Java this does nothing. Phantom.registerGoals() adds exactly four goals, an attack strategy, a sweep attack, the circling, and a player target, and none of them is an avoid-type goal. Cat itself, in the same jar, never references Phantom at all. Keep a cat on Java for the creepers it does scare off, not for this.
JavaChecked both directions in Java 26.2: nothing in the phantom's own behavior list, and nothing in the cat's own code that mentions phantoms at all.
What phantom membrane is worth
Elytra has 432 durability and only one item repairs it: phantom membrane. Each one restores up to a quarter of that in an anvil, and you can stack several in at once.
Awkward Potion plus a membrane brews straight into Slow Falling, no other ingredient does this. Add redstone after for the long version.
What a phantom drops
Only from a killing blow you land yourself. Let one burn to death in daylight, drown, or fall, and it drops nothing at all, on either edition.
Quick answers
How do you beat a phantom in Minecraft?
Why do phantoms spawn at night?
How do you stop phantoms from spawning?
How much damage does a phantom do?
Do cats scare away phantoms?
What do phantoms drop?
The insomnia spawn check, the swoop damage, the search range and the circling height came directly from how phantoms actually behave in Java 26.2, checked against the real code and not copied from a wiki. Bedrock's own entity and spawn rules files, version 1.26.30.5, gave the hitbox, the cat behavior and its own circling number independently. Two of the numbers this page first pulled automatically turned out to be the wrong layer for this mob, the swoop damage and the search range, and both are corrected above using the value that actually applies during a fight, not the listed default that never fires.
Redstone
Potion
Target