If you’ve ever lost a fully enchanted netherite pickaxe mid-deep dark run because you forgot to check its durability, you know how gutting that feeling is. You spend hours grinding for materials, enchanting, and upgrading gear, only for it to break right when you need it most. That’s exactly why mending is one of the most sought-after enchantments in the entire game. We’re breaking down how does mending work in Minecraft, plus all the tips and tricks you need to unlock it and use it to keep your best gear intact forever.
Core Mechanics: How Does Mending Work in Minecraft
At its core, mending is a treasure enchantment that converts experience orbs you collect into durability for your enchanted gear, instead of adding those orbs to your XP level bar. Every time you pick up an XP orb from mining, fighting mobs, smelting items, or any other XP-generating activity, the game first checks if you have any damaged items with mending equipped. Mending prioritizes any damaged enchanted item with mending before adding XP to your level bar, so you won’t gain levels until all your equipped mending items are fully repaired.
Each point of XP you collect repairs 2 points of durability on your item. For reference, a netherite pickaxe has 2031 durability points, so you only need just over 1000 XP to fully repair it from zero, which is the equivalent of about 10 levels of XP. If you have multiple damaged mending items equipped at once, the game picks one at random to assign each XP orb to, so you can repair multiple pieces of gear at the same time if you want.
You don’t have to hold the item in your main hand to repair it, either. Mending works on items in your offhand, as well as all four pieces of armor you’re wearing. That means you can repair your helmet, chestplate, leggings, boots, sword, and shield all at the same time while you’re fighting mobs at an XP farm. If all your equipped mending items are fully repaired, any XP you collect goes straight to your level bar as normal, so you don’t waste any orbs when your gear is already in good shape.
How to Unlock Mending Enchantments for Your Gear
Unlike most common enchantments like unbreaking or efficiency, mending is a treasure enchantment, which means you can’t get it from using a regular enchanting table no matter how many levels you spend. That trips up a lot of new players who spend hours grinding levels trying to roll mending on their gear, only to come up empty. There are four main ways to get mending books or enchanted gear in survival mode, and some are far more reliable than others.
Fishing is the most accessible early-game way to find mending, especially if you have a fishing rod enchanted with luck of the sea 3. You can fish from any body of water as soon as you have sticks and string, and while the drop rate is low, many players get their first mending book while fishing for food early in their playthrough. You can also find mending books in loot chests in generated structures like strongholds, desert temples, jungle temples, buried treasure, and raider outposts, but that method relies entirely on luck and exploration.
The most consistent way to get mending is by trading with librarian villagers, as you can reset their trades until they offer mending. All you need to do is find an unemployed villager, place a lectern near them to turn them into a librarian, and check their first level trade. If they don’t offer mending, break the lectern, place it again, and their trades will reset. You can repeat this process as many times as you want until they offer a mending book, usually for 5 to 64 emeralds. If you cure the villager after they turn zombie, you can get the mending book for as low as 1 emerald, which is a total steal.
In rare cases, you can also find mending enchanted on gear dropped by piglins when you barter with gold ingots, or on gear dropped by mobs like zombies or skeletons, but these methods are so inconsistent they’re not worth relying on. Stick to fishing early game and librarian trades for long-term access to mending, and you’ll never run out of the enchantment.
Pro Tips for Using Mending Effectively in Your World
Once you have your first mending book, there are a few best practices to follow to get the most out of the enchantment, so you don’t waste XP or the rare enchantment slot on low-value gear. I’ve tested all of these tips in my own survival worlds over the last 8 years, and they’ve saved me dozens of hours of grinding for replacement gear and XP.
- Equip only the damaged mending item you want to repair when collecting XP, so you don’t waste orbs on fully repaired gear. If you only need to fix your pickaxe, take off all your other mending armor and weapons while you farm XP, and all orbs will go straight to the pickaxe to speed up repairs.
- Build an XP farm near your base to repair all your mending gear quickly without exploring for hours. The best low-effort farms for early to mid game are zombie spawner farms, enderman farms, or even a simple cactus farm paired with a furnace array to smelt cactus into green dye for easy XP.
- Combine mending with unbreaking 3 for maximum durability, as this cuts down on how often you need to repair items significantly. Unbreaking 3 gives your gear a 400% effective durability boost, so you’ll spend 75% less XP repairing items over their lifetime.
- Avoid putting mending on disposable items like stone tools, golden tools, or even diamond tools you only use for casual tasks. Mending is too rare to waste on gear you can replace in 5 minutes, so save it for your top-tier netherite gear, elytra, and highest level enchanted tools you use every day.
Never combine mending with infinity on a bow, as the two enchantments are incompatible and will not work together. If you try to combine a mending book with an infinity bow on an anvil, the game will block the combination, so you have to pick one or the other. I usually pick mending for my main bow, since I can easily farm arrows, and I don’t have to worry about my bow breaking mid-fight with the ender dragon.
Another small trick I use is keeping a stack of coal or dried kelp in my inventory when I’m mining, so I can smelt cobblestone or raw ore as I go. The XP from smelting is small, but it adds up over time, and it keeps my pickaxe and armor repaired while I’m underground so I don’t have to stop and go back to an XP farm mid-run.
Common Mending Misconceptions to Avoid
There are a lot of wrong facts floating around about mending that I see new players repeat all the time, and some of them can lead to you wasting mending books or losing valuable gear. Let’s clear up the most common ones so you don’t make the same mistakes I did when I first started playing.
First, a lot of players think mending repairs items slowly over time even when you’re not collecting XP, but that’s not true at all. Mending only activates when you pick up an XP orb, so your gear will stay damaged until you collect orbs to repair it. If you’re low on XP and your gear is almost broken, stop what you’re doing and go collect some orbs before it breaks entirely.
Mending will not repair items stored in your inventory, ender chest, or shulker boxes, so you have to have them on your person to repair. I’ve had friends leave their damaged elytra in their ender chest for weeks thinking it would repair on its own, only to pull it out and find it’s still at 10 durability. If you want to repair an item, you have to hold it or wear it while you collect XP.
Another common misconception is that you lose the mending enchantment when you repair the item on an anvil, but that’s not the case either. You can combine a damaged mending item with another of the same material on an anvil to repair it, or use XP orbs, and the mending enchantment will stay on the item forever. You do not lose mending when you repair an item, the enchantment stays on the gear permanently unless you disenchant it on a grindstone.
Finally, some players think you can only have one mending item per world, but that’s completely false. You can get as many mending books as you want from librarian trades, so you can put mending on every piece of armor, every tool, your bow, crossbow, shield, and elytra if you want. The only limit is how much time you want to spend trading for emeralds to buy the books.
Once you get the hang of how does mending work in Minecraft, it completely changes how you approach survival mode, and you’ll never have to stress about losing your favorite gear after a long grind again. You can spend less time crafting replacement tools and mining for more diamonds, and more time building, exploring new biomes, or fighting bosses to get rare loot. If you haven’t unlocked mending yet, start by finding a librarian villager and setting up the trade first, it’s well worth the 10 or 15 minutes of effort to get unlimited access to the best enchantment in the game.