Infinity Enchantment: Unlimited Arrows vs Mending

Infinity means your bow never uses up normal arrows. You need one arrow in your inventory, and every shot after that is free. It has one level, goes only on bows, and can’t share a bow with Mending.

The fine print

• You still need at least one arrow somewhere in your inventory.
• Tipped arrows and spectral arrows are consumed as normal. Infinity only covers plain arrows.
• Arrows fired with Infinity can’t be picked up again.
• It doesn’t work on crossbows. If you want reusable crossbow ammo, Piercing lets you collect arrows after they hit.

One trap catches a lot of players: the bow fires the first arrows it finds (your offhand comes first), and that might be a stack of tipped arrows. If you only want to fire plain arrows, keep the special ones in a shulker box or a chest until you need them.

Infinity or Mending?

This is the big bow question, since you can only pick one.

Choose Infinity early in the game, or if you don’t have a steady XP source. Arrows cost flint, sticks and feathers, and running out mid-fight is a real problem before you have a skeleton farm.

Choose Mending once you’re set up. Arrows become trivial with a skeleton farm or a fletcher villager selling them, but a Power V bow with Infinity still wears out and costs more each time you repair it on an anvil. A Mending bow lasts forever.

A lot of players carry both: an Infinity bow for everyday shooting and a Mending bow for tipped arrows.

On Java, Infinity and Mending could share a bow until 1.11.1 made them exclusive. Any “Infinity Mending bow” you see in a video is either from an old version or made with commands.

Getting it

Infinity is the rarest bow enchantment on the enchanting table, with a weight of 1 (Power has 10). You’ll see it now and then on a level 30 bow, but a book is usually the faster route. Books come from fishing, monster rooms, other chests and librarians. In default trading, a librarian sells an Infinity book for 5 to 19 emeralds, cheap compared with level III books. Under the experimental Villager Trade Rebalance, desert librarians sell it.

If a bow already has Mending and you want Infinity instead, a grindstone strips the enchantments so you can start again. It removes every enchantment except curses, not just Mending.

The finished bow

Pair it with Power V, Flame, Punch and Unbreaking III. Unbreaking matters more on an Infinity bow than anywhere else, because it’s the only thing slowing down the wear. The best bow enchantments page has the full build, and the bow crafting guide covers the bow itself.