Gear with the best enchantments is always desired the most. However, it’s pretty much impossible to get some of them without combining enchantments. You may sometimes get lucky and obtain a perfect diamond pickaxe from an end city, but you’ll want to be geared up with some essential and high-level enchantments before you beat the game. So, with that said, we’ll be teaching you how to easily combine enchantments in Minecraft. If you’re ready, let’s begin!
Ways to Get Enchantments in Minecraft
You can get Minecraft enchantments in three different ways:
The enchanting table is the most common way of obtaining enchantments. It’s a block that allows you to apply enchantments to gear if you provide it with lapis lazuli and XP levels. However, as you probably know, this block requires a total of 15 bookshelves for the highest-tier enchantments. Otherwise, you won’t get very good enchantments.
Enchanted books, on the other hand, are items with enchantments attached to them. You can get them in various ways, like trading with librarian villagers, fishing, and looting chests in structures. These books can have special enchantments, or just the plainest ones possible.
On their own, enchanted books are not very useful, but if you combine them with the gear pieces, you’ll be able to easily make them overpowered.
The third way implies you obtain enchanted items by killing mobs, fishing, or looting chests. These items can contain various enchantments and usually need to be combined with enchanted books or other enchanted gear to get upgraded.
What Do You Need to Combine Enchantments
Now that we know how to get enchantments, let’s see what you need to combine them. The answer is one simple block called the anvil. This is the only requirement you have to combine enchantments in Minecraft, as you cannot do this in any other utility block
To make an anvil, you need three blocks of iron and four iron ingots. So, in total, that’s 31 iron ingots, which isn’t cheap.
Once you make and place the anvil, you can interact with it. You’ll see it has two slots with the “+” sign between them. There is an arrow between the second and third slot, which indicates the slot on the right is the output slot.
Also, there is a bar at the top, which you can edit to change the name of the item. The anvil is one of the most frequently used blocks, no matter whether you’re in the early or late game.
But there is a bit of a twist. You see, the anvil will slowly break over time. It has three stages: the first one has the regular anvil texture, the second is slightly damaged, and then third one is very damaged.
When you use a very damaged anvil for some time, it’ll eventually break completely, forcing you to make a new one. This mechanic further emphasizes the importance of the anvil.
In case you’re thinking: “Why can’t we just combine enchantments in the enchanting table?” Well, the answer is you can’t. You can only enchant an unenchanted item in the enchanting table. So, if it already has enchantments, this magical block won’t work anymore.
How to Combine Enchantments
Once you have got an anvil and some enchanted gear or enchanted books, follow the steps below to combine the enchantments in Minecraft. We’ll be focusing on the different enchantments first, but in case you want to see how to combine the same enchantments, check out the section below.
1. Combine Two Enchanted Gear Pieces
- Place an anvil and open its interface.
- Place the first enchanted gear in the left slot.
- Then, place the second enchanted gear in the middle slot. Note that these items need to be the same. You cannot combine a sword and boots nor a diamond sword and iron sword. Also, both items need to be enchanted.
- Now, when you hover over the slot on the right, you’ll see that all the different enchantments became available on the sword. So, they are simply glued together.
- However, this will not be the case if the enchantments are mutually exclusive. For example, sharpness and smite cannot be placed on the same sword.
- So, if you try to combine two swords with these enchantments, you’ll only get the enchantment from the sword in the first slot. All other enchantments will end up on the sword in the output slot though.
- Below, you will notice the text: “Enchantment Cost: <value>”. This is the number of XP levels that the combination will cost. This number can get high as well if you combine one item many times.
- However, in some cases, you can lower it. This is because the enchantments on the item in the second slot are added to the item in the first slot. So, if the item in the second slot offers more valuable enchantments than the item in the first slot, it’ll cost more levels to combine them.
- So, in our case, the first sword has sweeping edge III, but the second sword has looting III and sharpness IV, which are together more valuable than only sweeping edge III. This is why in this order, the cost is 16 levels.
- However, if we switch the swords, with the first one being looting and sharpness and the second one being sweeping edge, you’ll see that the cost changes to 12 levels. Therefore, we recommend you try to switch places for the items so you get the best possible XP cost.
- When you’re ready to combine the enchantments, simply click on the slot on the right and the two initial items will be replaced with one that has combined enchantments.
2. Combine Gear Pieces and Enchanted Books
Now, let’s see how you can combine an item and an enchanted book in Minecraft.
- Put the enchanted gear in the first slot in the anvil’s interface.
- Add the enchanted book in the second slot. Note that if this book contains any enchantments that are not suitable for the item you’re enchanting, they won’t end up on the item in the end, but just get deleted in the process. So, if you found a sharpness V and feather falling IV book somewhere, choose wisely before applying it to the piece of gear.
- Similarly to combining the enchanted items, enchantments of the enchanted piece of gear and the enchanted book will both end up on the item, which you can view on the right.
- In this case, the enchantment cost cannot be changed, as you cannot add an enchanted item to the enchanted book but only the book to the item.
- Alternatively, you can combine an unenchanted item with an enchanted book in the anvil and the process stays the same.
3. Combine Two Enchanted Books
In addition to combining enchanted items, you can also combine enchanted books. This is how to do that:
- Place enchanted books you want to combine in the first and second slots of the anvil’s UI.
- All the different enchantments will end up together on the enchanted book in the output slot.
- Since you can switch the places of these two items, you have a chance to lower the XP cost by leaving a less valuable enchantment in the second slot in the middle.
How to Combine the Same Enchantments
In the previous section, we focused on combining gear with different enchantments, but here, we’ll be combining identical ones. So, follow the steps below:
Combining the same enchantments depends on the level they have. So, if you have let’s say a sword with sharpness IV and a book with sharpness V, by combining them the sharpness IV enchantment gets completely deleted and replaced. This is because sharpness V is the higher and more valuable enchantment, so it takes priority.
The same happens when you combine two enchanted books or two enchanted items. The lower-level enchantments is deleted in the process, while all other enchantments just get added together.
However, you’ll get a different result if you combine two similar enchantments that are also of the same level. So if you have a sword with sharpness IV and a book with IV, combining them won’t yield sharpness IV but sharpness V. So you have a chance to create a better enchantment even if you just have low level ones.
Technically, you could get sharpness V from lots of sharpness I enchantments, though the only disadvantage to this method is that it’ll cost a lot of levels to combine all of them. So, it’s much better to make sharpness V out of two sharpness IV enchantments than lots of sharpness I enchantments.
So that’s how you combine enchantments in Minecraft. If you have never done this before, do not worry, it only seems complicated but is really not. All it requires is for you to be lucky and get the enchantments you need and also to have sufficient levels to combine them.
So, feel free to check out our guide on the best farms to gain XP in Minecraft, as you will need it for extensive enchantment combining sessions.
You may not be able to combine enchantments if they’re mutually exclusive or it’s too expensive levels-wise.
You can, but Sharpness I will get deleted in the process, so only Sharpness II stays.
Yes, by combining fortune II and fortune II you’ll get fortune III.
No, unbreaking III and unbreaking III won’t produce unbreaking IV. This enchantment doesn’t exist in the vanilla game.
Yes, it works very similarly to combining pieces of gear.
