Minecraft Enchanting: Table, Anvil and Enchantment Calculators

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How the enchanting table, 15 bookshelves and the anvil work in Minecraft 26.x, why the anvil says Too Expensive, and what an enchantment calculator works out.

A first-person Minecraft view of a jungle with full health and hunger bars and an empty experience bar

You want a pickaxe with Fortune III and Mending, and you want to know how many bookshelves that takes, where your levels go and why the anvil suddenly says "Too Expensive". Enchanting runs on two blocks: the enchanting table rolls random enchantments, and the anvil adds the exact ones you pick from books. This guide covers both for Java Edition 26.3 and Bedrock Edition 26.60, the current versions on 1 November 2026, plus what an enchantment calculator works out and the commands an operator can use on a server.

Quick answer: Craft an enchanting table from a book, 2 diamonds and 4 obsidian, and place 15 bookshelves around it with a one-block gap. The bottom slot then always offers a level 30 enchantment, which needs 30 levels but costs only 3 levels and 3 lapis lazuli. For exact enchantments, combine enchanted books on an anvil. Every anvil job except a plain rename raises the item's prior work penalty (0, 1, 3, 7, 15, 31 levels), and in Survival a job that would cost 40 levels or more shows "Too Expensive". A Minecraft enchantment calculator finds the cheapest order to combine your books and keeps that penalty low. On a server, operators can skip the grind with /enchant or /give.

How the Enchanting Table Works

The table enchants pickaxes, shovels, axes, hoes, fishing rods, all four armor pieces, swords, spears, bows, crossbows, maces, tridents and books, as long as the item has no enchantments yet. Other items, such as shears or an elytra, only take enchantments from a book on an anvil.

Put the item in the table with lapis lazuli next to it, and three offers appear, each with a level number. To take one you need at least that many levels, but the table charges only 1, 2 or 3 levels, and the same number of lapis, for the top, middle and bottom offer. Hover over an offer to see one enchantment it will give; more can come with it. The glyph text on the buttons is only decoration.

Higher offers roll better on average, yet even a level 30 offer can give a lone Efficiency III. The material counts too. Every item has an enchantability value, and a higher value tends to bring more and higher enchantments from the same offer: gold armor has 25, gold tools 22, netherite 15, iron tools 14, diamond 10 and books 1.

Mending, Frost Walker, Soul Speed, Swift Sneak, Wind Burst and the two curses are treasure enchantments, which never come from the table. Librarian villagers sell books with almost any enchantment, Mending included, and fishing and loot chests turn up enchanted books as well. Librarians never sell Soul Speed, Swift Sneak or Wind Burst; those come from certain structures, and Soul Speed also from bartering with piglins.

The three offers come from an enchanting seed saved with your player, and they stay the same until you enchant something. If you dislike all three, enchant a book in the top slot for 1 level and 1 lapis, and the offers change.

Bookshelf Placement for Level 30 Enchantments

Bookshelves raise the offers, up to 15; more are ignored. Each one must stand exactly two blocks from the table in one direction, which leaves a one-block gap, and at most two blocks to the side in the other direction, on the same level as the table or one block higher. The usual build is a ring of bookshelves on the edge of a 5 by 5 square, one block high, with the table in the middle and one spot left open as the entrance: 15 bookshelves.

Keep the gap clear. In Java Edition the block between table and bookshelf must be air or a replaceable block such as snow or short grass, and even a torch cuts that bookshelf off. In Bedrock Edition the gap must be air, both at table height and one block above it.

Offer levels by number of bookshelves:

BookshelvesTop offerMiddle offerBottom offer
01 to 21 to 61 to 8
51 to 53 to 1110 to 15
102 to 75 to 1620 to 23
152 to 106 to 2130

A bookshelf is 6 planks and 3 books, and a book is 3 paper and 1 leather, so 15 bookshelves take 90 planks, 135 sugar cane and 45 leather, plus one more book for the table. A bookshelf broken without Silk Touch drops its 3 books.

Enchanted Books and the Anvil

An anvil takes 3 blocks of iron and 4 iron ingots, 31 ingots in all. The item in the left slot is the target, and the book or second item on the right is the sacrifice, whose enchantments move to the target. Two books with the same enchantment at the same level make the next level, so two Sharpness IV books give Sharpness V, up to the enchantment's maximum.

In Java Edition, a job costs:

  • the prior work penalty of both items, explained in the next section,
  • for each enchantment on the right-hand item, the level it ends up at times a multiplier. From a book that is 1 per level for Sharpness, Efficiency, Protection and Unbreaking, 2 for Fortune, Looting and Mending, and 4 for Thorns and Silk Touch,
  • 1 level for a rename, and 2 levels when you repair a damaged item with a second one of its kind.

For most enchantments an item carries double the multiplier of a book, so books are the cheap way to add them. Bedrock Edition charges only for the levels an enchantment gains: merging two Sharpness IV books costs 1 level there and 5 in Java.

Some enchantments exclude each other, such as Sharpness, Smite and Bane of Arthropods, Fortune and Silk Touch, the four kinds of Protection, and Infinity and Mending. In Java, the anvil drops a conflicting enchantment from the right-hand item and still charges 1 level for it.

Why the Anvil Says "Too Expensive"

Every anvil job except a plain rename adds to the item's prior work penalty, and every later job pays it again:

Anvil jobs so farPenalty on the next job
00
11
23
37
415
531
663

In Survival and Adventure the anvil takes jobs worth up to 39 levels. From 40 it shows "Too Expensive", however many levels you have. An item with five anvil jobs behind it only accepts work worth 8 levels or less, and after six jobs nothing but a Java rename gets through. When two worked items meet, both penalties count, and the result carries the higher job count plus one. In Creative the anvil has no level limit; a server's default game mode is the gamemode line explained in our server.properties guide.

To stay under the limit:

  • Plan the order. Combine books in pairs before they touch the item, and put the expensive enchantments on while the penalty is still low. The calculators in the next section search the orders for you.
  • Rename during another job. A rename adds 1 level to a job you are doing anyway, and renaming on its own adds no penalty. In Java a rename-only job is capped at 39 levels; in Bedrock a rename can be Too Expensive as well.
  • Repair with Mending, not the anvil. Every anvil repair counts as a job, while Mending repairs the item from experience orbs.
  • Start over at a grindstone. It strips every enchantment except curses, resets the penalty, keeps a custom name and gives back some experience.

What a Minecraft Enchantment Calculator Does

Most enchantment calculators plan the anvil. You choose the item and the enchantments you have on books, the tool tries the possible orders, and it lists the cheapest one step by step: what goes left, what goes right and what it costs.

Take a pickaxe that should get Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, Fortune III and Mending from four separate books, at Java costs:

  • One book at a time: 27 levels in any order, and the pickaxe ends with four anvil jobs, so its next job starts with a penalty of 15.
  • One of the cheapest orders: 23 levels, and only three jobs on the pickaxe, for a penalty of 7.
    1. Pickaxe left, Fortune III book right: 6 levels.
    2. Efficiency V book left, Mending book right: 2 levels.
    3. Pickaxe left, the Efficiency and Mending book right: 9 levels.
    4. Pickaxe left, Unbreaking III book right: 6 levels.

With more books the gap grows. One book at a time, a seventh book never fits, and the Minecraft Wiki shows boots with seven enchantments that only work when the books are paired first.

We opened these calculators on 1 November 2026:

The other kind of calculator predicts the enchanting table. The Enchant Calculator on minecraft.tools shows the odds of an enchantment for an item and level, but its version menu stops at Minecraft 1.16, so mace and spear enchantments are missing. A website cannot tell you your next roll either, because the offers come from the enchanting seed saved with your player, which it cannot see.

Enchanting With Commands on Your Server

In Java Edition, /enchant and /give need permission level 2; in Bedrock Edition, /enchant needs level 1 and cheats turned on. Our OP commands guide covers the permission levels. In the server console, leave out the slash and use the player's name.

/enchant changes the item in the player's main hand and keeps to Survival rules: no level above the maximum, nothing that conflicts and, in Java, nothing the item already has, so it cannot raise Sharpness I to Sharpness V.

enchant Steve minecraft:sharpness 5
enchant Steve minecraft:mending

In Java, /give builds an item with its enchantments in the enchantments component, or an enchanted book with stored_enchantments. Since Java 1.21.5 the levels sit directly in the component; guides that wrap them in levels:{...} show the older format.

give Steve minecraft:netherite_pickaxe[enchantments={efficiency:5,fortune:3,unbreaking:3,mending:1}]
give Steve minecraft:enchanted_book[stored_enchantments={mending:1}]
give Steve minecraft:diamond_sword[enchantments={sharpness:10}]

/give accepts levels up to 255 and even conflicting enchantments, but how much a level above the normal maximum still does depends on the enchantment. Bedrock's /give cannot add enchantments, so on Bedrock /enchant is the tool, within the normal limits.

To rescue an item that shows Too Expensive, a Java operator can reset its prior work penalty, stored as the repair_cost component, on the item in the player's main hand:

item modify entity Steve weapon.mainhand {"function":"minecraft:set_components","components":{"minecraft:repair_cost":0}}

Plugins can take over these command names. EssentialsX, for example, has its own /enchant <enchantmentname> [level] for the item in your hand and /give <player> <item|numeric> [amount [itemmeta...]], and its config.yml ships with unsafe-enchantments: false, which keeps over-level and conflicting enchantments out of its kits and item spawning. If a command answers with a usage line unlike the ones above, a plugin is handling it.

On a Space-Node Minecraft server, every plan runs on the Pterodactyl panel, and its live console runs these commands without SSH. If you would rather players keep their enchanted gear when they die, our keep inventory guide has the command for 26.x and Bedrock.

FAQ

How many bookshelves do you need for level 30 enchantments? Fifteen, each two blocks from the table with an empty block between, on the table's level or one higher. If the bottom offer stays below 30, look for a torch or another block in a gap, or a bookshelf at the wrong height.

Does a level 30 enchantment cost 30 levels? No. You need 30 levels to choose it, but it takes 3 levels and 3 lapis lazuli, and you keep the other 27 for the next one. From level 0, reaching level 30 takes 1,395 experience points.

How do I fix "Too Expensive" in Minecraft? In Survival you cannot lower the penalty an item already has; a grindstone resets it but removes the enchantments too. Next time, pair the books first or let a calculator plan the order. On a Java server, an operator can reset repair_cost with the /item modify command above.

Can you get Mending from an enchanting table? No. Mending is a treasure enchantment. Librarian villagers sell Mending books, and fishing and loot chests can give them.

Is there an enchantment calculator for Bedrock? The Minecraft Wiki lists Anvil Calc for both editions; it has a checkbox for Java Edition. Java calculators can overstate Bedrock costs, because Bedrock only charges for the levels an enchantment gains.

How do I get Sharpness 10 or other levels above the maximum? Only with commands, and only in Java: /give with the enchantments component, as shown above, takes levels up to 255. /enchant stops at the normal maximum.

Sources

All opened on 1 November 2026: