What a grindstone does
A grindstone is the block you use to strip enchantments off an item and get a little experience back in the process. Drop an enchanted sword in, pull a plain sword out, and collect the XP orbs that pop off the block. It is the cheapest way to clean up gear you don’t want the enchantments on anymore.
It has a second job too. Put two of the same item in a grindstone and it repairs them into one, combining their remaining durability. No experience cost, no anvil needed. The catch is that this repair also wipes any enchantments, so it’s best for plain tools and weapons.
One thing the grindstone cannot do is remove curses. Curse of Binding and Curse of Vanishing stay on the item no matter how many times you run it through. Everything else comes off.
How to remove enchantments with a grindstone
Removing enchantments is the main reason most players build one. The process takes a few seconds.
- Right-click the grindstone to open its interface. You’ll see two input slots on the left and one output slot on the right.
- Place your enchanted item in either of the two input slots. The top slot or the bottom slot both work for a single item.
- Look at the output slot. It shows the same item with its enchantments gone, plus a small XP number.
- Take the item out of the output slot. The experience orbs drop next to you, so stand close to soak them up.
The amount of XP you get back depends on the enchantments that were on the item and their levels. A piece of gear loaded with high-level enchantments gives more than a tool with one weak enchantment. It’s never the full cost you paid to enchant it, but it’s not nothing, and it’s free experience you’d otherwise lose if you melted the item down or tossed it.
This works on tools, weapons, and armor. If an item has multiple enchantments, the grindstone removes all of them at once. You can’t pick and choose which enchantment to keep.
Why remove enchantments at all?
A few reasons come up often. You might have grabbed a villager-traded or loot-chest item with a bad enchantment combo and want a clean base to re-enchant. You might want the XP back before recycling old gear. Or you’re prepping an item for an anvil combine and want it stripped first so the prior-work penalty stays low. Pulling a Silk Touch off a pickaxe so you can put Fortune on it is a classic case.
How to craft a grindstone
You need three ingredients: two sticks, two wooden planks, and one stone slab. Any wood type works for the planks, and the plain stone slab is the one made from smooth-ish stone, not cobblestone or any other variant.
Open a crafting table and place them like this:
- Top row: stick, stone slab, stick
- Middle row: plank, empty, plank
- Bottom row: empty
That gives you one grindstone. The stone slab is the part players trip on, since it has to be a stone slab specifically. If you only have a full stone block, run it through a stonecutter or crafting grid to make slabs first.
Where to find a grindstone
You don’t have to craft one. Grindstones generate naturally in villages, usually in or near the weaponsmith’s building. If you find a village early, you can grab a free grindstone and skip the recipe entirely. Mine it with any pickaxe to collect it.
A grindstone needs a pickaxe to drop when broken. Break it with your hand or the wrong tool and you get nothing, so bring a pickaxe before you start swinging.
Where you can place a grindstone
A grindstone is flexible about where it sits. You can place it on the floor like a normal block, mount it on a wall, or hang it from the underside of a block on the ceiling. Each orientation changes the model slightly: floor grindstones stand on a pair of legs, wall grindstones bolt onto the side, and ceiling ones hang down.
This makes it handy for tight bases and themed builds. A wall-mounted grindstone in a blacksmith corner reads well, and you can still right-click it to open the interface from any orientation. Functionally all three placements behave the same, so pick whichever fits your layout.
How much XP you get back
The experience refund scales with the enchantments on the item, not with the item itself. A diamond sword with a single low-level enchantment returns less than the same sword carrying several high-level ones. Higher enchantment levels mean more orbs.
The grindstone never refunds the full cost of enchanting. The intent is to give you a slice of value back, enough to be worth doing before you scrap or re-enchant gear, without making disenchant-and-redo a free loop. If you’re chasing levels, mob farms and mining are far better sources. Treat the grindstone refund as a bonus, not a strategy.
Repairing items with a grindstone
Beyond disenchanting, the grindstone repairs two matching items into one. Place two iron pickaxes, two bows, or two of any identical item in the input slots, and the output is a single item with their durability added together, plus a small bonus of about 5% of the item’s max durability.
The big trade-off: this repair strips enchantments, the same as the disenchant function. So you’d only repair this way with plain gear. For enchanted gear you want to keep, the anvil is the tool, because it repairs without erasing your enchantments. The grindstone shines when you have two beat-up plain tools and want one usable tool out of them at zero XP cost.
Grindstone vs anvil for disenchanting
These two blocks get mixed up, so here’s the clean split. The grindstone removes all enchantments and hands you some XP. It costs no levels to use. The anvil does the opposite kind of work: it adds enchantments from a book, combines two enchanted items, renames items, and repairs while keeping enchantments, all at an experience cost.
If your goal is to take enchantments off and recover a bit of XP, use the grindstone. If your goal is to put enchantments on or keep them while repairing, use the anvil. They’re complementary blocks, and most serious bases have both.
Using a grindstone as a villager job site
A grindstone is the job-site block for the weaponsmith profession. Place one near an unemployed adult villager, with no existing claimed job site nearby, and the villager can take the weaponsmith job. You’ll see green particles when they claim it.
Weaponsmiths trade emeralds for things like enchanted iron and diamond swords and axes, and they buy raw materials such as coal and iron. If you’re trying to lock in a specific trade, break and replace the grindstone while the villager has no trades locked to reroll what they offer. Once you’ve traded with them at least once, the trades are set and rerolling stops working.
Tips and common mistakes
Stand close when you pull the disenchanted item out. The XP orbs spawn at the block, and if you walk away too fast you can miss some of them.
Don’t expect to recover the full enchantment cost. The XP refund is partial by design, so disenchanting is a way to reclaim a little value, not a way to farm levels efficiently.
Remember curses are permanent. If you picked up a chestplate with Curse of Binding hoping to scrub it clean, the grindstone won’t help. The curse rides along on every output.
Use the right block for the job. Players often run enchanted gear through a grindstone to repair it and then wonder where their enchantments went. If you wanted to keep them, that was an anvil job.
Frequently asked questions
Does a grindstone remove curses?
No. Curse of Binding and Curse of Vanishing stay on the item. The grindstone removes every normal enchantment but leaves curses in place.
Do you get XP back when you remove enchantments?
Yes. The grindstone returns some experience based on the enchantments and their levels. It’s a partial refund, not the full amount you spent enchanting the item.
Can a grindstone disenchant an enchanted book?
No. The grindstone works on tools, weapons, and armor, not on enchanted books. There’s no way to turn an enchanted book back into a plain book with it.
Does repairing with a grindstone cost experience?
No. Combining two items in a grindstone to repair them is free. The cost is that the repair also removes any enchantments on those items.
What slab do I need to craft a grindstone?
A plain stone slab, not cobblestone, smooth stone, or any other variant. If your recipe isn’t working, the slab type is the most likely reason.
What villager uses a grindstone?
The weaponsmith. Placing a grindstone near a jobless villager lets them become a weaponsmith, who trades enchanted swords and axes for emeralds.
The grindstone is one of the cheapest quality-of-life blocks in the game, and most players underuse it. If you’re sitting on a pile of mismatched enchanted gear or villager-bought tools you don’t love, run them through a grindstone, claim the free XP, and re-enchant from a clean slate.