How to disenchant items with a grindstone in Minecraft

A grindstone strips enchantments from tools, weapons, armor and enchanted books, and gives back part of the experience. It also repairs two damaged items of the same type and clears the anvil's prior work penalty. All values below are for Java Edition 26.3.

The recipe uses 2 Sticks, 1 Stone Slab and 2 planks of any wood:

• Top row: Stick, Stone Slab, Stick.
• Middle row: planks, empty slot, planks.

The slab must be a plain Stone Slab: cobblestone and smooth stone slabs do not work. Smelt Cobblestone into Stone, then craft 3 Stone into 6 Stone Slabs. Grindstones also generate in village weaponsmith houses. Any pickaxe mines one; without a pickaxe it drops nothing.

Use the grindstone to open its menu, called Repair & Disenchant. It has two input slots and one output slot.

1. Put the enchanted item in either input slot.
2. The output shows the same item without its enchantments and with the same durability.
3. Take the output. The original item is consumed and experience orbs drop next to the grindstone.

Two things survive: curses (Curse of Binding and Curse of Vanishing) and the item's custom name. You cannot pick which enchantment to remove: all the others go at once. In Java Edition, an item with no enchantment shows a red cross and no output.

Each enchantment level has a fixed value in the game data. The grindstone adds up the values of all non-curse enchantments, then drops a random amount of experience points between half of that total (rounded up) and the full total.

These are experience points, not levels. A pickaxe with Efficiency V, Unbreaking III and Fortune III totals 95, so it returns 48 to 95 points. Sharpness V alone gives at most 45 points, enough to go from level 0 to level 4. Damaged gear with Mending that you wear or hold absorbs the orbs to repair itself first: take it off if you want the levels.

Put two items of the same type in the two input slots, for example two Iron Pickaxes. Enchanted or not, they merge into one unenchanted item. Its durability is the sum of both, plus a bonus of 5% of the maximum durability (rounded down), without going over the maximum.

Example: a Diamond Pickaxe has 1,561 durability, so the bonus is 78. Two pickaxes with 600 and 500 uses left become one pickaxe with 1,178. You get XP for the enchantments of both items, curses stay, and the result keeps the name and armor trim of the item in the top slot. To keep the enchantments instead, combine the items in an Anvil, which costs levels.

An Enchanted Book placed alone gives a plain Book plus XP. Books go in one at a time: since Java Edition 1.20.5, two enchanted books in the slots give no output. This is a quick way to cash in the books you will never use, such as the low-level ones from fishing or trading.

Every anvil operation except renaming adds a prior work penalty to the item. It grows from 0 to 1, 3, 7, 15 and then 31 extra levels. Once an operation costs more than 39 levels, the anvil shows Too Expensive! in Survival.

The grindstone resets this penalty together with the enchantments. In Java Edition it only accepts a single item if it is enchanted: to clear the penalty of an unenchanted item, combine it with a second item of the same type. Bedrock Edition also accepts an unenchanted item that has a penalty.

A clean item is the best base to rebuild a full set of enchantments with books. The planner below gives the merge order that keeps the anvil cost lowest.

• Re-roll a bad enchantment. The Enchanting Table only enchants items that have no enchantment. A sword that rolled Bane of Arthropods instead of Sharpness can go back to the table after the grindstone. See how to get level 30 enchantments, and the best sword enchantments for what to aim for.
• Clean up loot. Enchanted bows, swords and armor from mobs and chests rarely have the right enchantments. Turn them into XP, or into clean items for your own set: compare with the best armor enchantments and the best bow and crossbow enchantments.
• Restart before the anvil. If an item is close to Too Expensive!, grinding it resets the penalty and lets you rebuild it in a cheaper order.

A cursed item stays cursed: the grindstone is not a way to get rid of Curse of Binding.

The grindstone is the weaponsmith's job site block. An unemployed villager near an unclaimed grindstone can take it and become a Weaponsmith, who trades weapons for emeralds. Place one in your trading hall if you want that profession: see villager trading for how to lock in good trades.