How to Get Mending in Minecraft and How It Repairs Gear

Mending repairs an item whenever you pick up experience orbs: each XP point fixes 2 durability. With Mending and a steady XP farm, your gear never breaks, which is why it is the most valuable enchantment in the game for anything you plan to keep.

It has one level, goes on nearly every item with durability (armor, tools, weapons, bows, crossbows, tridents, maces, elytra, shields, fishing rods and more) and conflicts only with Infinity.

How the repair works

• The item has to be in your main hand, off hand or an armor slot. Inventory items are ignored.
• For each orb, the game picks one damaged Mending item at random and spends the orb’s XP on it. Durability level doesn’t change the odds.
• XP left over after the repair goes to your level bar. While anything equipped still needs repair, your bar fills slowly.
• Fully repaired items drop out of the pool, so the XP moves on to whatever is still damaged.

This means you should hold the item you want repaired and take off fully repaired armor if you’re in a hurry. Pair Mending with Unbreaking III so the item loses durability more slowly in the first place.

How to get Mending

Librarian villagers are the reliable route in both editions. Put a lectern next to an unemployed villager and look at its trades. If neither book is Mending, break the lectern and put it back. As long as you haven’t traded with the villager, it rerolls. A Mending book costs 10 to 38 emeralds plus a book, because treasure enchantments cost double. Curing a zombie villager first gives a big discount.

Fishing pulls up treasure books now and then; Luck of the Sea raises the odds. See how to start fishing.

Loot chests in non-village structures can hold Mending books. Ancient cities are a good bet.

Raid drops (Bedrock only). Pillagers and other raiders can drop enchanted items, including Mending.

The experimental trade rebalance

Both editions have an optional Villager Trade Rebalance experiment. With it on, Mending is no longer a random librarian book: only a master-level swamp librarian sells it. Villages don’t generate in swamps, so you have to breed villagers inside a swamp biome to get one. Ancient city chests also become more likely to hold Mending. Normal worlds don’t have this turned on.

Feeding it XP

Any XP source works: mining coal and quartz, smelting, breeding animals, fishing and especially mob farms. A blaze farm or any other mob farm can repair a full kit in a few minutes. Even without a farm, normal play produces enough XP to keep a pickaxe topped up.

Put Mending on everything you’d be sad to lose. The best armor enchantments and best sword enchantments guides assume it.