How Enchanting Works in Minecraft

Enchanting in Minecraft turns ordinary gear into the tools that carry you through the late game. There are three ways to get an enchantment onto an item — the enchanting table, an anvil with an enchanted book, and villager trades — and they interact in ways that aren’t obvious. This guide covers the table; once you have your books, the enchantment calculator finds the cheapest way to combine them.

The enchanting table

An enchanting table needs two inputs: the item you want to enchant and lapis lazuli (1–3 per enchant). It then offers three random enchantment options drawn from a pool weighted by rarity. The level of the options shown depends entirely on the bookshelves around the table.

Bookshelves and the level-30 setup

Each bookshelf placed one block away from the table (with one air gap between them) raises the maximum enchantment level on offer. The cap is reached at 15 bookshelves, which unlocks the full level-30 enchantment slot — the best the table can offer. Fewer than 15 and you are leaving power on the table; more than 15 does nothing. The classic layout is a 1-block ring of 15 shelves around the table, two shelves high on the corners.

Table enchantments vs treasure enchantments

Of the 43 enchantments in Minecraft 26.2, only 36 can appear at an enchanting table. The rest are treasureor curse enchantments you will never see in the table’s three options — you have to find them as loot, buy them from villagers, or fish them up, then apply them with an anvil. The treasure-only enchantments in this version are: Curse of Binding, Curse of Vanishing, Frost Walker, Mending, Soul Speed, Swift Sneak, Wind Burst.

This is why anvil planning matters so much: the most desirable enchantments — Mending and Soul Speed among them — only ever arrive as a single book, and a careless combine can waste levels you spent hours gathering.

Combining what you get

Once you have an enchanted item from the table and one or more enchanted books, you bring them together on an anvil. The order you combine them changes the total experience cost dramatically, and a bad order triggers the “Too Expensive!” lock in survival. That is a whole topic on its own — see how anvil cost is calculated — and the calculator solves the cheapest order for you automatically.

Which enchantments should you aim for?

Different gear wants different enchantments, and a few (like Mending) are worth chasing on almost everything. Our guide to the best enchantments for each item breaks down the standard loadouts for swords, tools, armor and ranged weapons in 26.2.