Mending enchantment in Minecraft

How Mending repairs your gear

When you pick up an experience orb, the game looks at the equipment you are wearing and holding, in either hand. Among the damaged items that carry Mending, it picks one at random and spends the orb on it. One experience point gives back 2 durability. Experience left over once that item is fully repaired goes to your level bar as usual.

Two consequences matter in practice:

• Only equipped items are repaired. A Mending pickaxe in a chest or in your hotbar (not in hand) gets nothing. To repair it quickly, hold it in your main hand or off hand while you collect experience.
• Repairs come before levels. While your Mending items are damaged, your level bar barely moves. If you need levels for the enchanting table, take the damaged gear off first.

Any experience source works: mining ores, smelting in a furnace, breeding animals, trading with villagers, fishing, killing mobs or throwing a Bottle o' Enchanting. A mob farm or an XP farm near your base turns Mending into near-unlimited durability.

The best ways to get Mending

Trade with a librarian

Librarian villagers can sell enchanted books, and Mending is one of the enchantments their books can carry. This is the most reliable method because you can reroll the offer. Place a lectern next to an unemployed villager, check the trades, and if Mending is missing, break the lectern and place it again. This works as long as you have not traded with that villager yet. Once you buy something, the offers are locked for good.

Villagers never sell tools or armor that already carry Mending: only the books do.

Fishing, chests and vaults

Enchanted books and gear caught as fishing treasure can roll Mending, and so can enchanted loot from chests across the world. In Trial Chambers, the rare reward pool of a regular vault includes a book drawn from a short list that contains Mending. These routes are random. They are worth knowing about, but a librarian trade is the one to plan around.

Mending and Unbreaking: use both

The two enchantments do different jobs and stack perfectly. Unbreaking slows down wear by letting each use skip durability loss some of the time. Mending refills what is lost. Together, a tool loses durability slowly and gets it back while you play, which is why almost every endgame tool and armor piece carries both.

The one real conflict is on bows: Mending cannot be combined with Infinity. Pick Infinity if you never want to carry arrows. Pick Mending if you want a bow that lasts forever.

Where Mending matters most

• Elytra: they cannot be repaired cheaply otherwise, and flying burns durability fast.
• Netherite and diamond tools: the materials are expensive, and an anvil repair grows more costly each time.
• Armor: every hit you take wears all four pieces at once.
• Tools you use constantly, such as shears, a fishing rod or a mace.

Mistakes to avoid

• Adding Mending last on a heavily worked item. Each anvil operation raises the cost of the next one. Apply Mending early, when the item is still cheap to work on.
• Putting it on a grindstone. A grindstone strips every enchantment except curses, Mending included.
• Waiting for the enchanting table. It will never appear there, whatever your level or the number of bookshelves.

✓ Checked in Java Edition 26.3 · updated 31 October 2026