I grew up on Minecraft, so to say I have some experience with the game would be an understatement. I’m here to impart some of my hard-won wisdom to you, so here are the three best ways to get mending enchantment books in Minecraft.
Players aren’t able to craft mending enchantment books. As a result, you can only find them out in the world. There are three different methods that players can use:
- Fishing
- Chests
- Trade with a librarian
Those are the only three methods you can use to get a mending enchantment book, so let’s talk a little more about each one.
How to Get a Mending Enchantment Book in Minecraft
Out of the three methods you have access to, the one that requires the least amount of effort is easy fishing.
If you’ve ever spent significant time fishing in Minecraft, you know there’s more than just fish in those waters. You can end up reeling in all sorts of things, including enchantment books.
One of the enchantment books that can spawn while fishing is a book of mending. It’s a rare drop, but you can get your hands on one with perseverance. That’s not to say you should spend hours fishing in Minecraft. I’m not cruel enough to suggest that. Instead, you can make an automatic fishing machine to do your work.
You can make several different machines to automate the fishing process, most of which are simple to create and don’t take up too much space. By making one of these machines and leaving it running, you can go about your business, returning to it every so often to see whether or not you’re lucky enough to have one of the books spawn.
Looting chests is arguably the least reliable method of obtaining books of mending because it relies on finding said chests in the first place. Trying to find the enchantments from these chests is more of something you should keep in mind that an active farm, so makes sure you’re checking every spawned chest you come across, but don’t go out of your way to search them out.
Several types of chests can spawn books of mending, including:
- End city chests.
- Dungeon chests.
- Temple’s chests.
This last method for obtaining the mending enchantment involves trading with a village librarian. This method is technically farmable but will cost you a lot more resources than simply relying on a fishing farm.
Librarians will trade you one random enchantment book in exchange for an emerald. Needless to say, these books have a chance of being books of mending. That means that, theoretically, you could rely on trading to get your hands on a book quickly. However, that is a little more difficult to pull off practically.
Emeralds aren’t exactly the easiest resource to come across. While they don’t have much use compared to something like diamonds, the last thing you should want to do is waste them on pointless enchantments you’ll never use.
Still, I need to point out this method because it’s technically a way for you to get your hands on the enchantment, especially if you have a ton of emeralds saved up just sitting in your chest.
That’s not where we’re stopping this librarian discussion, though. If you haven’t been around much since the villager update, you’re probably unaware of how everything works. Specifically, you might not know you can create certain villagers. So if you don’t have access to a librarian, or yours was killed in a pillager raid, you can spawn a new one.
How to Get a Librarian in Minecraft
To get yourself a librarian, you must have a regular villager first. If your entire village has been wiped out in Jedi-temple style, then getting a fresh one to spawn is another issue for another article. For now, I’m assuming you have a vanilla Squidward wandering around and generally being useless. So, it’s time for you to take on a parental role and tell that useless villager to get a job.
Getting a villager to do librarian colors is a rather simple two-step process:
Step 1: Isolate the villager away from the rest of the pack. You have a few ways to do this, but I’m partial to the boat method. Build and place a boat near your villager, and they should automatically get into it. Then all you have to do is drive it away from anyone that might interfere with your incoming forced labor. Remember that boats can’t move on solid ground, so you need to build a shallow river or get around the issue in a more technical way.
Step 2: Build a lectern. Lecterns are one of those fancy new blocks introduced with the villager job update that allows you, among other things, to turn a villager into a librarian. Give your villager access to the lectern, and you’re done. Now you’re ready to start spending all of those precious emeralds desperately trying your luck in what is essentially the precursor to loot boxes.
How to Farm Librarians in Minecraft for Enchantment Books
I’ll maintain that using an AFK automatic fishing farm is still the best method you have for getting enchantment books, whether mending or not. However, if you have a nice reservoir of emeralds, you can farm librarians for these books.
That’s not me saying you can get many of them because you can’t. Rather, this is a way to reset the librarian’s inventory in case you don’t get it the first time. To reset the librarian’s inventory, all you have to do is remove and replace the lectern. The game will register this as the villager losing then regaining their profession, letting you try for a book of mending again.
Why the Mending Enchantment is So Good in Minecraft
We’re talking about all of these farms, but you might not know why books of mending are even worth getting in the first place. To put it simply, think of the enchantment like unbreaking on steroids. Rather than giving your item a chance not to use up durability, it actively repairs it while you play, like a built-in portable anvil.
How it works is by using up XP, you get out in the world to repair your item rather than it going to your player level. This means that in situations where you’re mining, the XP you get from coal will essentially allow you to use your pickaxe indefinitely.
The downside to this, of course, is that you won’t be able to level up. However, if you’re at a point in your game where you’re looking to use this kind of enchantment, you should already have an XP farm set up, so this shouldn’t be a problem.
How to Use a Mending Enchantment Book in Minecraft
Once you’ve gone through the painstaking, or not so painstaking, if you’re using the fishing method, the experience of getting your hands on one of these books, you need to know how to use one. Chances are that you already know this, but if you’ve been out of the loop since the good old days, you might need a bit of a refresher course.
First, you need to get an anvil. Anvils are simple yet incredibly powerful items that allow you to rename and repair weapons. They also let you apply enchanting books to your weapons. So, take the item you want to enchant and take your book over to your anvil. Place the item in the first slot and the book in the second slot. The finished product will be in the third slot, so just pick it up, and you’re good to go.
Why is My Enchanting Book Not Working in Minecraft?
No, it’s not a glitch. There are two distinct reasons why your enchantment book isn’t working.
First, you’re attempting to apply an enchantment to an incompatible item. This should go without saying, but you can’t apply an infinity enchantment onto your iron sword; otherwise, you would turn into Erza from Fairytail (which, now that I think about it, actually sounds great.)
The second reason it might not work is that your level is too low; just like with regular enchanting, a level requirement is needed to apply books to items. Without the levels needed to put the enchantment onto your pickaxe, sword, or anything in between, you’re stuck with the two separate items until you level up some more.
As I said, this shouldn’t present too much of a problem. Making XP farms in Minecraft are ludicrously easy to the point where you can make one that banks XP while you’re off doing what you’re doing. So if you are too low, take a trip to your cactus or nether farm and grab a few extra levels. It shouldn’t take any more than a couple of minutes.