Grindstone

Overview

A grindstone strips enchantments off an item and gives you back some of the experience they cost. Put in an enchanted tool, weapon, armour piece or book and it comes out plain, with a few levels returned — not the full price, but enough that disenchanting is rarely a total loss. Curses are the exception: Curse of Binding and Curse of Vanishing survive a grindstone and cannot be removed by anything. The more important function for anyone doing serious anvil work is that a grindstone resets the item's prior work penalty. Every anvil combination doubles the cost of the next one, and the grindstone is the only way back from "Too Expensive" short of crafting a new item — you lose the enchantments, but you get a clean item you can start again with. It also repairs: two damaged items of the same type combine into one with their durability added plus a small bonus, at no level cost, which is the cheapest repair route in the game for anything unenchanted. It is the weaponsmith villager's job site block, so placing one beside an unemployed villager gives you a trader who sells enchanted iron and diamond weapons.

Removing unwanted enchantments and recovering experience, resetting an item's prior work penalty so an anvil will accept it again, repairing two damaged items for free, and assigning the weaponsmith profession.

Grindstone counts as a functional block in Minecraft 1.21.4. Grindstone is made at a crafting table. Hardness 2 puts it in the middle of the pack for mining speed.

Mine it with a wooden pickaxe or better, or you get no drop at all. Broken correctly, it drops itself. Sixty-four fit in one inventory slot.

The recipe calls for Stick, Stone Slab, and Oak Planks. It is not used in any crafting recipe.

How to get it

Craft it from 2 sticks, 1 stone slab and 2 wooden planks. Grindstones also generate in weaponsmith buildings in villages, so the first one most players use is taken rather than crafted.

Tips

It cannot remove Curse of Binding or Curse of Vanishing — those two survive everything except destroying the item.
Use it to strip a villager-traded enchanted book of a useless enchantment and recover 1 or 2 levels.
Combining 2 damaged unenchanted tools here costs 0 levels, unlike the same repair on an anvil.
See anvil mechanics and Too Expensive for when a reset is cheaper than a new item.

How long it takes to break

Grindstone sits at hardness 2: 10 seconds per block with your fists, 0.35 with the correct netherite tool.

You are looking at 0.5 seconds on iron and 0.4 on diamond — the iron step is where the time actually falls.

Below wooden the block breaks and simply vanishes. Bring the right tier or leave it in the ground.

Efficiency contributes its level squared plus one to tool speed, which makes Efficiency V roughly 3.5 times faster than the plain tool.

* breaks the block but yields no drop
Tool	No enchantment	Efficiency III	Efficiency V
Hand *	10 s	10 s	10 s
Wooden	1.5 s	0.25 s	0.15 s
Stone	0.75 s	0.25 s	0.1 s
Iron	0.5 s	0.2 s	0.1 s
Diamond	0.4 s	0.2 s	0.1 s
Netherite	0.35 s	0.2 s	0.1 s
Golden	0.25 s	0.15 s	0.1 s

Properties

Grindstone resists blasts at 6, which usually is not enough when something explodes nearby. Light does not pass through it, and it emits none of its own. A single slot takes 64, the usual full stack. The fastest tool for it is a pickaxe; any other kind of tool mines it no faster than a bare hand does, because the speed bonus only applies to the tool class the block is tagged for.

Transparent: No
Required tool: Wooden Pickaxe