How to enchant your tools and armor in Minecraft (2024)

Minecraft's enchantments add buffs to your tools, weapons, and armor. Enchantments do things like make fishing faster, increase your mining speed, or even add lightning damage to attacks.

In this Minecraft enchanting guide, we’ll walk you through building an enchanting table, getting better enchantments, and list some of the available enchantments.

Build an enchanting table

To enchant items, you’ll really only need an enchanting table, but a grindstone (2 sticks, 1 stone slab, 2 planks) and an anvil (3 blocks of iron, 4 iron ingots) will come in handy too.

An enchanting table requires one book, two diamonds, and four obsidian.

Books can be made from three paper (that you can craft from sugar cane) and one leather.

Diamonds are a little harder to come by. First, you’ll need (at least) an iron pickaxe. Then, you’ll have to dig down below level 15 or so (15 blocks above where stone becomes deepslate). Diamond gets even more common the lower you go, so 15 is the minimum depth, but closer to level -60 will be more productive.

Once you have some diamonds, craft a diamond pickaxe so you can gather obsidian. You might find obsidian on the surface in a ruined portal, or in caves where flowing water meets lava. It’s much easier, though, to make your own. If you have a steady supply of lava — like with a lava farm to generate infinite lava — place a bucket of lava in a hole and dump a bucket of water onto it. The lava becomes obsidian.

With all your resources gathered, make your enchanting table.

Enchanting items and enchantment level

To enchant an item, you’ll need the item you want to enchant and some lapis lazuli. Lapis lazuli is that blue-speckled ore that you find while mining. It’s most common right around level 0 where stone transitions to deepslate.

Image: Mojang/Microsoft via Polygon

To enchant your tool, you’ll simply place it on the enchanting table in the left slot and place some lapis lazuli in the right slot. Three enchantment options will appear to the right. Applying one of the enchantments will cost 1 to 3 lapis lazuli and 1 to 3 player levels (that you earn from XP). The green number to the right side is the minimum level you need to unlock that enchantment, but doesn’t affect the cost.

The three enchantments that pop up depend on two things: your level (the green number at the bottom of the screen) and the enchantment level. You’ll increase your player level by collecting XP, which you can earn from doing things like killing mobs, mining ores, and smelting. Increasing the enchantment level requires bookshelves.

Image: Microsoft/Mojang via Polygon

Placing a bookshelf (3 books, 6 planks) one block away from an enchanting table increases its enchanting level. Every bookshelf you add makes the enchanting table’s level a little higher, up to a total of 15. (Basically, this means that the more bookshelves you have, the better the enchantments will be.) There needs to be one space between the bookshelf and the enchanting table, and nothing can be in that space (not even a torch).

Getting different enchantments

The three enchantments that pop up when you use an enchanting table are pulled from a set list. There’s some randomness to it, so you’ll get better ones as your level increases or as you add and remove bookcases — but the list won’t change too much.

To get a new list for the table to randomly pull from, you’ll need to use one of the enchantments offered. Grab the cheapest one — it’ll always cost 1 lapis lazuli and 1 level — and apply it to something like a book or a random weapon. When you go back to the table, the list will be (mostly) new.

Removing and combining enchantments

Using a grindstone (2 sicks, 1 stone slab, 2 planks) will remove the enchantments from an item.

An anvil (3 blocks of iron, 4 iron ingots) allows you to combine enchantments from two items or apply an enchanted book to an item.

List of Minecraft enchantments

A list of enchantments that can be added to tools and armor using an Enchanting Table can be found below, courtesy of the Minecraft Wiki. For a full list of Enchantments, check out the Minecraft Wiki.