Minecraft Enchantments Guide: Every Enchantment, Max Level and Best Setup

How enchanting works

There are four ways to get an enchantment onto an item, and a good player uses all of them. The enchanting table spends experience levels and lapis lazuli to apply a random selection of enchantments, with better results at higher levels; it cannot give treasure enchantments. Enchanted books carry a specific enchantment and are applied to items in an anvil, which is also how two enchanted items are combined. Villager librarians sell enchanted books for emeralds, including treasure ones. And loot — chests, fishing, raids and mob drops — occasionally provides enchanted items or books directly.

Enchantments have levels written in Roman numerals. Sharpness V is the maximum obtainable in survival; a higher level shown on a commands-created item is not something you can craft. Some enchantments are mutually exclusive and cannot coexist on one item, and the anvil silently drops the second one if you try.

Building the enchanting table setup

The table on its own offers enchantments up to level 8. Each bookshelf placed correctly around it adds to the maximum, and fifteen shelves take it to the level 30 cap. The rules for “correctly”:

• The bookshelf must be exactly one block away from the table horizontally, with an air block between them.
• It must be at the same height as the table or one block higher.
• The air gap must actually be air. A torch, carpet, item frame, sign or even a snow layer in the gap disqualifies that shelf. Light the room from the walls or ceiling instead.

The standard layout is a 5×5 ring of shelves around the table with a gap for the door: fifteen shelves fits in a single-height ring with one opening, or a two-high ring with more openings. Each bookshelf costs six planks and three books; three books cost three leather and nine paper, so the full setup is roughly 90 planks, 135 sugar cane worth of paper and 45 leather. Cows are the bottleneck; a small cow farm pays for itself here.

Level 30 enchantments cost three lapis and three levels to apply (they require you to have 30 levels but only deduct three), so the real cost of a top-tier enchant is getting to level 30 in the first place. Our XP calculator shows that level 30 is 1,395 points — about half of it is in the last ten levels.

Armour enchantments

Protection IV on all four pieces is what most players end up with, and it is the right answer. The specialised protections give more against their damage type, and a dedicated Fire Protection set for Nether trips is a reasonable luxury once you have a librarian selling it, but it is a second set, not a replacement.

Sword, axe and mace

The mace, added in 1.21, is the exception to “Sharpness on everything”: its damage comes from fall distance, so Density is the choice for general use and Breach for armoured targets and PvP. The axe is the highest-damage-per-hit melee weapon on Java but has a slower cooldown; on Bedrock, where there is no cooldown, the sword’s speed wins.

Pickaxe, shovel, hoe and shears

You want two pickaxes: Efficiency V, Fortune III, Unbreaking III, Mending for ore, and Efficiency V, Silk Touch, Unbreaking III, Mending for everything else. A Silk Touch pickaxe lets you carry ore blocks home and mine them with Fortune later, once you have the Fortune pickaxe. An Efficiency V shovel is one of the most underrated tools in the game for anyone who terraforms.

Bow, crossbow and trident

The classic bow is Power V, Unbreaking III, Infinity (plus Punch or Flame to taste). Because Infinity and Mending are exclusive, dedicated bow users often carry a second Mending bow for grinding. Tridents are rare enough — only from drowned — that the usual advice is Loyalty III, Channeling, Impaling V, Unbreaking III, Mending on the one you find, and a separate Riptide trident only if you get a second.

Fishing rod, elytra, shield

• Fishing rod: Luck of the Sea III (more treasure, fewer junk items), Lure III (faster bites), Unbreaking III, Mending. An AFK fishing setup with this rod is a slow but steady source of enchanted books and name tags.
• Elytra: Unbreaking III and Mending only. With both, an elytra never needs phantom membranes again as long as you collect XP while flying.
• Shield: Unbreaking III and Mending, applied via anvil.
• Shears: Efficiency, Unbreaking, Mending. Silk Touch is possible via anvil but rarely worth a book.
• Flint and steel, carrot on a stick, warped fungus on a stick, brush: Unbreaking and Mending.

The best full loadouts

If you want a checklist to work towards, this is the “god set” most survival players end up with. Every item also has Unbreaking III and Mending.

The cheapest way to get there is not the enchanting table. It is a villager trading hall with librarians locked to the books you want, which our villager trading guide explains step by step. A table gets you random Protection II and Efficiency III; a librarian sells you Protection IV every time.

Anvils, books and “Too Expensive”

The anvil combines two items of the same type, or an item and a book, keeping the higher level of any shared enchantment and bumping the level by one when both have the same level (Sharpness IV + Sharpness IV = Sharpness V). Each operation costs levels based on the enchantments involved plus a prior work penalty that doubles every time an item has been through an anvil: 0, 1, 3, 7, 15, 31. Once a job would cost 40 levels or more, survival-mode anvils display “Too Expensive!” and refuse.

The way around it is to plan the combine order so the final item is touched as few times as possible:

1. Combine books with books first, pairing equal-level books to raise levels (two Sharpness IV books → one Sharpness V book).
2. Merge the finished books into as few multi-enchantment books as you can, keeping the cheapest books for the last merges.
3. Apply the merged book to the item in one or two operations. An item enchanted on the table and then given a single combined book has a penalty of just 1 or 3.

A grindstone removes all non-curse enchantments and resets the prior-work penalty, refunding a little XP — useful for salvaging a mis-enchanted item. Renaming also costs a level and counts as work, so rename in the same operation as a combine. Anvils lose durability with use and eventually break; keep iron on hand.

Frequently asked questions