What Mending does
Mending is the closest thing Minecraft has to a permanent gear glue. Instead of letting your hard-won diamond pickaxe slowly wear out, Mending lets you spend experience points to repair it. Any XP orb you pick up while a Mending item is equipped or held flows into that item’s durability bar instead of your level bar.
It is a treasure-only enchantment, so you cannot roll it from a regular enchanting table. Instead it shows up through villager trades, fishing, and structure loot. That makes it the highest-priority enchantment in most survival worlds. Once a tool has Mending, it does not need to be replaced.
How Mending repairs your gear
The exchange rate is simple: 1 XP point repairs 2 durability. A small green orb worth 3 XP will repair 6 durability on a Mending item.
The game checks your equipped items every time you pick up an XP orb. If at least one Mending item is damaged, the orb is consumed by one of those items at random instead of going into your XP bar. If the chosen item still needs more repair after the orb is used, the next orbs keep going to Mending items until everything you carry is at full durability.
Once every Mending item you have on you is at full durability, any remaining XP orbs go straight to your level bar like normal. On older versions of Minecraft this overflow XP would have been wasted, but modern Java and Bedrock both route leftover XP back to the player.
Which slots count for Mending
Mending checks six slots:
- Main hand
- Off hand
- Helmet
- Chestplate
- Leggings
- Boots
If you are holding a Mending pickaxe and wearing a full set of Mending armor, that is six items in the lottery. Each XP orb picks one damaged Mending item to repair. Items already at full durability are skipped, so an orb will not be wasted on a piece that does not need it.
Which items can have Mending
Almost anything with a durability bar can hold Mending:
- Pickaxe, axe, shovel, hoe
- Sword, bow, crossbow, trident
- Helmet, chestplate, leggings, boots (all material tiers, including netherite)
- Shield and elytra
- Fishing rod, shears, flint and steel
- Carrot on a stick, warped fungus on a stick
- Brush
One important exception on Java Edition: Mending and Infinity are mutually exclusive on bows. You have to pick one. Most players go Mending for the long-haul value, since arrows are cheap once you have a skeleton farm or a fletcher villager.
How to get Mending
Mending is treasure-tier, which means an enchanting table will never give it to you. You only see it through these four sources.
Villager trading (the best method)
A master-level librarian villager has a chance to sell a Mending book for emeralds. This is the cheapest, most repeatable source. The price floats between roughly 8 and 30 emeralds, depending on biome, reputation, and whether the trade has been refreshed.
The standard farm setup goes like this: place a lectern, wait for a villager to claim it and become a librarian, then break and replace the lectern over and over until the librarian’s level-5 trade is a Mending book. Once it is, lock the trade in by trading something at a lower level. From there you can stack up books cheaply for years.
Curing a zombie villager (throw a splash potion of Weakness, then feed a golden apple) drops their trade prices through the floor for the rest of their life. A cured librarian will often sell Mending books for just one emerald.
Fishing
Cast a fishing rod into open water and you might pull up an enchanted book with Mending on it. The drop rate is low on a plain rod and improves with the Luck of the Sea enchantment. Lure makes fish bite faster but does not change the enchantment quality of treasure hauls.
Fishing is slower than a librarian farm but works fine as a chill backup, especially before you have found a village.
Loot chests
Mending books show up as random enchanted-book loot in many structure chests. Common spots include strongholds, dungeons (the small mossy ones with mob spawners), jungle temples, desert pyramids, woodland mansions, end cities, mineshaft minecarts, bastion remnants, ruined portals, and ancient cities.
You can also occasionally find a pre-enchanted tool or weapon with Mending already on it, though plain Mending books are easier to apply where you want them.
Bartering with piglins
Trading gold ingots to piglins in the Nether can drop random enchanted books in the loot table. The chance of getting a Mending book specifically is low, and the rolled enchantment on any book is random, so bartering is not a focused method for it. Still, if you are running a piglin trading farm for gold and netherite anyway, you will see Mending books in your output now and then.
Putting Mending on a tool with an anvil
Once you have a Mending book, you combine it with your tool in an anvil. The anvil charges you XP levels for the operation, and the cost grows with each “prior work” the item has on it.
A few rules of thumb for the anvil:
- Apply Mending early in a tool’s enchantment lifecycle, before the prior work penalty stacks up.
- Combining two books in an anvil first, then combining the result onto the tool, is often cheaper than book-by-book application.
- If the anvil shows “Too Expensive” (more than 39 levels), you have hit the cap and the operation is blocked on Java survival. Bedrock does not enforce that cap as strictly, but you still pay the full XP cost.
Practical strategy for using Mending
The point of Mending is that you stop replacing gear. To make that real, pair it with a way to generate XP on demand.
- Build a basic mob farm (zombies, skeletons, or a general-spawner grinder) and stand at the collection point with your Mending tools equipped.
- Use a kelp farm feeding a smoker or furnace bank. Smelting dried kelp gives a steady trickle of XP when you collect the output.
- Cure villagers for cheap emeralds, trade emeralds for Mending books at a librarian, then repeat. The XP from villager trades themselves also feeds your Mending gear.
One useful trick: if you only want to repair a specific item, take off your other damaged Mending pieces before farming XP. That way every orb goes into the one piece you care about instead of being split across the lottery.
Common Mending mistakes
The cleanest gotchas to avoid:
- Applying Mending too late. Save it for early in a tool’s life. Putting Mending on a tool that already has five other enchantments will balloon the anvil cost.
- Wearing four damaged Mending pieces and expecting fast repair on one. Repair on any single piece is slow when multiple pieces qualify. Strip down to the piece you want fixed and farm XP just for it.
- Wasting XP on an enchanting table. Mending never rolls from a table. Stop trying.
- Putting Mending on a Java bow you also want Infinity on. You can only have one of the two on the same bow.
Java vs. Bedrock differences
Mending behaves almost identically on both editions. The biggest platform-specific note is the Mending and Infinity compatibility on bows: Java keeps them mutually exclusive, so you cannot have both on the same bow without commands. The XP overflow fix, where leftover XP goes to the player after gear is fully repaired, is present on both editions in modern versions.
Villager trade prices and reroll mechanics work the same in both, though the visible UI for trades differs. Loot tables for chests cover the same set of structures with similar weights.
Frequently asked questions
Can you put Mending on a netherite tool?
Yes. Netherite tools and armor follow the same enchantment rules as their diamond counterparts. You can apply the Mending book before upgrading to netherite or after; the enchantment carries through the smithing template process.
How much XP does it take to fully repair an item?
Divide the missing durability by 2. A diamond pickaxe at half durability (around 781 missing out of 1,561) needs roughly 390 XP points to fully repair via Mending. That works out to about 14 levels of XP at low-level rates.
Why isn’t my Mending working?
A few common reasons. The item might already be at full durability, in which case XP goes to your bar as normal. You might have multiple Mending items equipped and the random distribution is favoring a different one. Or you might be gaining XP from a source the game does not award normally, like a creative mode XP orb or command-given XP via /xp set.
Can you get Mending from an enchanting table?
No. Mending is treasure-only. The enchanting table will never offer it, regardless of bookshelf count or player level. You have to trade for it, fish for it, or find it in a chest.
Does Mending work in the off-hand?
Yes. The off-hand slot is one of the six slots Mending checks. A shield or torch in the off-hand will absorb XP orbs the same way a main-hand pickaxe will, as long as the off-hand item itself has Mending on it.
Is Mending compatible with Unbreaking?
Yes, and the combination is the point. Unbreaking slows down durability loss, Mending refills what is lost. Together they make a tool effectively permanent.
Does Mending repair an elytra?
Yes, and this is one of the most important pairings in the game. Wearing a Mending elytra while flying through a mob farm or kelp XP farm lets you keep your wings indefinitely without farming phantom membrane.
Bottom line
If you only chase one enchantment in your world, make it Mending. Set up a librarian farm, stock a few stacks of books, and put Mending on every piece of gear you actually use. The first time you watch a half-broken diamond pickaxe heal itself while you fight zombies is the moment Minecraft stops being a game about replacing tools.