Anvil

Overview

An anvil is the block that combines things: two damaged items into one with the durability added together, an enchanted book onto a tool, a name onto anything, and a repair using the item's own material. It is the only way to apply Mending, to push an enchantment past what a table will offer, or to rename a mob with a name tag. The mechanic that trips everyone up is the prior work penalty. Every time an item goes through an anvil its penalty doubles the cost of the next combination, and once the total reaches 40 levels the anvil refuses outright with "Too Expensive". That is why the order of combinations matters enormously — combining books together first and applying the result once is dramatically cheaper than applying five books one at a time. A grindstone resets the penalty at the cost of stripping the enchantments. The anvil also wears out: roughly 12 percent of uses damage it, and it passes through chipped and damaged states before being destroyed entirely after around 25 uses. It is a falling block, so it obeys gravity and deals damage to anything it lands on.

Applying Mending and other book-only enchantments, repairing gear with its own material instead of losing enchantments, renaming items and mobs, and combining two worn tools into one with more durability.

In Minecraft 1.21.4, Anvil is a functional block. A crafting table turns its ingredients into Anvil. A hardness of 5 makes it slow going without the right tool.

Anything below a wooden pickaxe breaks it without leaving a drop. It drops as the same block you mined. Its blast resistance of 1,200 shrugs off creeper explosions.

Sixty-four fit in one inventory slot. The recipe calls for Block of Iron and Iron Ingot. It is not used in any crafting recipe.

How to get it

Craft an anvil from 3 blocks of iron and 4 iron ingots — 31 ingots in total. A damaged anvil can be repaired only by crafting a new one; there is no way to restore a chipped anvil.

Tips

• Combine books with books first, then apply the single result: the same enchantments cost far fewer levels that way.
• Rename an item before enchanting it — renaming adds to the prior work penalty and is cheapest on a fresh item.
• Use a grindstone to reset an item whose penalty has hit "Too Expensive"; you lose the enchantments but recover some experience.
• See anvil mechanics and Too Expensive for the exact cost order on a full gear set.

How long it takes to break

At a hardness of 5, Anvil takes 25 seconds to punch out and 0.85 seconds with a netherite-tier tool of the correct class.

Iron manages 1.3 seconds and diamond 0.95, which makes diamond the tier that changes how this block feels.

It will break below wooden, and you will get nothing for it. That combination of time spent and drop lost is the classic mining mistake.

Efficiency adds its level squared plus one to the tool speed, so Efficiency V is about 3.4 times faster than the same tool unenchanted.

Properties

With 1,200 blast resistance Anvil holds up to a creeper or TNT at point-blank range. It is fully opaque and produces no light. One inventory slot holds 64, the normal full stack. A pickaxe is fastest here; any other class mines it at bare-hand speed, because the bonus only applies to the class the block is tagged for.

Crafting recipe

Crafting Table

→

Anvil

Drops

Mined with Wooden Pickaxe, Anvil drops itself.

Anvil

Guides and tools that cover this

• GuidesAnvil Mechanics and the "Too Expensive" Limit→
• ToolsEnchantment Order Calculator→
• GuidesThe First Ten Things to Build in a New Minecraft World→
• ToolsXP Level Calculator→

Frequently asked questions

Related pages

Chipped AnvilDamaged AnvilBlock of IronIron IngotAcacia Wall SignBamboo DoorAcacia Wall Hanging SignBamboo Fence Gate