You finally found it. After hours of dodging creepers and looting dusty desert temples, a Mending book is sitting in your inventory. It’s the holy grail of Minecraft items. But now what? If you just slap it onto a diamond pickaxe without thinking, you might realize later that you've blocked yourself from adding Efficiency V or Fortune III because the "work penalty" got too high. Honestly, it’s a total buzzkill when the anvil says "Too Expensive!" in red letters just because you didn't know the order of operations.
Understanding how to use enchanted books is basically the difference between having a "decent" set of gear and being an unkillable god in your survival world.
It’s not just about clicking buttons. There is a hidden math at play here that most players ignore until they’re stuck with a sword they can't repair anymore. Minecraft tracks how many times an item has been through an anvil. Every single time you combine something, that hidden counter goes up. If you aren't careful, your gear becomes a literal paperweight.
The Anvil is Your Best Friend (And Your Worst Enemy)
To get started, you need an anvil. Crafting one takes three blocks of iron and four iron ingots. It's expensive early on, but you can't bypass it. Once you have your anvil and your book, you place the item you want to enchant in the left slot and the book in the middle slot.
The right slot shows the result. You'll see an experience cost. Pay it, and you're golden.
But here is the catch: the order matters immensely. If you are trying to put Protection IV and Unbreaking III on a chestplate, putting the books on one by one is usually fine. However, if you are trying to build a "god tier" piece of armor with five or six enchantments, you have to use a "tree" method. Combine two books first. Then combine another two. Then put those combined books onto the armor. This keeps the work penalty low. If you just keep feeding single books into the armor, the cost will double every time until it hits the 40-level cap. At 40, the game basically tells you to get lost.
Why You Should Stop Using the Enchantment Table for Everything
Most people think the enchantment table is the main way to get powered up. It's not. It’s a gambling den. You spend 30 levels and hope for the best, only to get Knockback II on a sword where you really wanted Sharpness.
Enchanted books give you surgical precision.
By using librarians—villagers you’ve trapped in a trade hall—you can buy specific books like Silk Touch or Feather Falling IV whenever you want. This is the "pro" way to play. You aren't praying to an RNG god; you're just trading paper for emeralds and emeralds for power. If you find a librarian selling Mending for 10 emeralds, you have essentially won the game. You'll never need to craft a new tool again as long as you have a steady supply of XP from a mob farm.
Common Enchantment Conflicts You Need to Know
You can't just mash every book onto a single item. Minecraft has rules about what can coexist.
- Protection vs. The Others: You can't have Protection, Fire Protection, Projectile Protection, and Blast Protection all on one piece of armor (unless you're playing an ancient version like 1.14.2). General Protection is almost always the better choice because it covers everything.
- Sharpness, Smite, and Bane of Arthropods: These are mutually exclusive. Sharpness is the king for general use. Smite is only for the Wither or clearing out a zombie spawner.
- Silk Touch vs. Fortune: You have to pick one. Most players carry two pickaxes: one for silk-touching glass and ore blocks, and one for "popping" those ores with Fortune III to get more diamonds.
- Infinity vs. Mending: This is the toughest choice on a bow. Infinity gives you endless arrows, but Mending keeps the bow from breaking. Most late-game players choose Mending and just carry a shulker box full of arrows, because a maxed-out bow is a pain to replace.
The Secret "Prior Work Penalty" Math
Every item has a tag called RepairCost. When you use an enchanted book on an anvil, the game looks at the RepairCost of the item and the book. It takes the higher value, adds it to the enchantment cost, and then updates the item's new cost to $2n + 1$, where $n$ was the previous cost.
It scales exponentially. Fast.
If you find a book in a dungeon, it usually has a penalty of 0. If you’ve combined that book with another book to upgrade it (like turning two Sharpness IV books into one Sharpness V), that book now has a penalty of 1. Putting that "Level 1" book on a sword is more expensive than a "Level 0" book.
This is why fishing for books or raiding End Cities is so valuable. You often find books that already have three or four high-level enchantments on them. Using one of these "multi-books" counts as a single anvil use, saving you a massive amount of XP and keeping your item "fresh" for longer.
Getting Creative with Grindstones
What if you mess up? Or what if you find a gold sword with a great enchantment but you want the book instead? Well, you can't actually take an enchantment off an item and turn it back into a book. That's a common myth.
However, you can use a Grindstone to strip an item of all its enchantments (except curses) to get some XP back. This resets the RepairCost. If you have a diamond sword that says "Too Expensive," you can grind it down to a blank slate and start over. You lose the old enchantments, but you save the diamonds.
How to Get the Best Books Fast
Fishing used to be the meta, but it got nerfed. Now, it’s all about the Villager Trading Hall.
- Find a Zombie Villager: Cure it with a splash potion of weakness and a golden apple. This lowers prices.
- Give them a Lectern: This makes them a Librarian.
- Check their trades: If they don't have the book you want (like Mending or Efficiency V), break the lectern and place it again. Their trades will reset.
- Lock it in: Once you see the book you want, trade once. Now they are locked into that book forever.
This is the most consistent way to master how to use enchanted books. You can effectively "order" a full set of gear by just walking down a line of villagers. It takes the "luck" out of the game and replaces it with a system.
👉 See also: Why the Wand of Magic Detection is the Most Underrated Tool in Your D\&D Arsenal
Don't Forget the Treasure Enchantments
Some books cannot be found at an enchantment table. No matter how many bookshelves you place, you will never see them. These are "Treasure Enchantments."
- Mending: Repairs the item using XP orbs.
- Frost Walker: Turns water into ice as you walk.
- Curse of Binding/Vanishing: These are actually bad, but they show up on books in chests.
- Swift Sneak: Only found in Ancient Cities (Deep Dark). This makes you crouch-walk faster.
To use these, you must find the physical book or a villager who sells it. You can't gamble for them with lapis lazuli.
Practical Steps for Your Next Session
If you want to optimize your gear right now, follow this workflow to ensure you don't hit that "Too Expensive" wall.
First, gather all the books you need for a single item. Let's say you want a "God Axe." You'll need Sharpness V, Unbreaking III, Mending, Efficiency V, and Silk Touch.
Instead of adding them one by one to the axe, pair them up. Combine Sharpness with Unbreaking. Combine Efficiency with Silk Touch. Now you have two "super books." Add the first super book to the axe. Then add the second. Finally, add Mending by itself. This method keeps the internal "multiplier" low because the axe only "thinks" it has been worked on three times instead of five.
Next, always check the XP cost before clicking. If a combination costs 30+ levels, stop. Ask yourself if there is a cheaper way to combine those books first. Usually, swapping the items in the anvil slots (putting the book on the left and the tool on the right) doesn't work for enchanting, but when combining two books, swapping their positions can sometimes save you 5–10 levels depending on their individual penalties.
Finally, keep a dedicated "XP farm" ready. Whether it’s an enderman farm in the End or a simple mob grinder in the overworld, you need a way to replenish levels. Using enchanted books is an "expensive" hobby in terms of XP, and you don't want to be stuck grinding cows for three hours just to put Looting III on your sword. Look for a spawner near your base and turn it into a kill chamber—it'll make the whole process feel less like a chore and more like a victory lap.