How to Make a Grindstone in Minecraft

Sooner or later everyone enchants the wrong thing — a great pickaxe with a useless enchantment, or looted gear that would be perfect if it were not enchanted at all. The grindstone is the humble block that fixes those mistakes. It repairs worn tools, strips enchantments, and even hands you back some experience for your trouble.

What You Need

• 2 sticks
• 2 planks (any wood type, and they do not need to match)
• 1 stone slab

Sticks and planks come straight from logs. For the slab, smelt cobblestone into stone in a furnace, then place three stone blocks along the bottom row of a crafting table to get stone slabs.

Crafting the Grindstone

1. Place a stick in each top corner of the crafting grid.
2. Put the stone slab in the top-center slot, between the sticks.
3. Place one plank under each stick in the middle row.
4. Collect your grindstone and set it down on a solid surface.

Place it in or near a village if you can: an unemployed villager who touches a grindstone becomes a weaponsmith, one of the better trading professions.

How the Grindstone Works

The grindstone has two input slots and one output. It only accepts two items of the same type and material — a diamond pickaxe pairs with another diamond pickaxe, never with a sword or an iron pickaxe. Whatever you combine, the result is a single item whose durability equals both inputs added together, plus a small bonus on top.

Repairing plain items

Feed it two worn, unenchanted tools and you get one repaired tool with their combined durability and the bonus — no XP cost, no anvil required. It is the cheapest repair method in the game.

Removing enchantments

Put in one enchanted item (alone in a slot, or paired with a matching plain item) and the output comes out completely unenchanted. In exchange, the grindstone refunds experience based on how many enchantments it stripped and how strong they were. This is the fastest way to recycle disappointing enchanting-table results and enchanted loot from structures.

Finding a Grindstone Instead

Crafting one is easy, but you may not even need to. Grindstones generate naturally inside village weaponsmith houses, usually mounted near the walls or ceiling. You can mine one with a pickaxe and take it home — the village weaponsmith will simply claim a different grindstone if you place another, or stay jobless without one. It is a handy shortcut in the first days of a world, when a quick way to strip a bad enchantment off looted gear matters more than the three minutes of crafting. That said, at two sticks, two planks and a slab, crafting your own is barely slower than the trip to steal one.

The Limits

• Curses stay. Curse of Binding and Curse of Vanishing cannot be removed by a grindstone, and cursed enchantments grant no XP.
• If one input item carries a curse, that curse transfers onto the output item.
• Combining two enchanted items still produces a plain item — enchantments never merge here. Use an anvil for that.

Grindstone vs Anvil

They do opposite jobs. The anvil applies and combines enchantments and repairs with raw materials, at an XP cost. The grindstone removes enchantments and repairs by merging, and actually gives XP back. A good enchanting room wants both side by side.