Mending vs Infinity: Which Is Better on a Bow in Minecraft?

Few Minecraft debates have lasted as long as this one. Mending and Infinity are both top-tier bow enchantments, but they are mutually exclusive — the game forces you to pick a side. Do you want a bow that never breaks, or a bow that never runs out of arrows? Here is how each one actually plays, and how to decide.

How Mending Works on a Bow

Mending turns collected XP into repairs. As long as the bow is in your main hand or off-hand when you pick up XP orbs, that experience goes into restoring its durability instead of your level bar. Park yourself at any decent XP farm and the bow is effectively immortal.

The catch is how you get it. Mending is a treasure enchantment, so the enchanting table never offers it. You need the enchanted book, which means trading with librarian villagers, looting structure chests, or fishing — and the loot-based routes are heavily luck-dependent. The other catch is ammunition: a Mending bow consumes real arrows, so heavy use means carrying stacks of them and aiming carefully, because every missed shot is gone.

How Infinity Works on a Bow

Infinity removes the ammunition problem entirely. With just one normal arrow sitting in your inventory, you can fire forever — the arrow is never consumed. That frees up inventory space and removes any pressure to make each shot count.

There are two limits. First, Infinity only works with plain arrows; tipped and spectral arrows are still used up normally. Second, the bow itself wears down like any tool. You can repair it in an anvil by combining it with another bow, but the XP cost climbs until the anvil displays "Too Expensive!" — a fully enchanted bow can usually only be repaired about twice before that happens. Infinity is also much easier to obtain than Mending: the enchanting table offers it directly, and the book shows up in trades and loot.

So, Which Should You Choose?

It comes down to how replaceable your bow is. If you rolled a dream combination of enchantments and have no easy way to recreate it — no villager trading hall, no pile of spare books — Mending protects that investment permanently. Losing a one-of-a-kind bow hurts far more than carrying extra arrows.

If you do have a trading hall and can rebuild a powerful bow whenever you like, Infinity is the better everyday choice. Bows become disposable, your inventory stays clean, and you can shoot freely without tracking ammunition. Adding Unbreaking stretches an Infinity bow's life considerably, so replacements are rare in practice.

That is why most players land on Infinity. But the balance shifts if enchanted books ever become harder to trade for — the rarer good bows get, the more Mending looks like the smart long-term play. Neither answer is wrong; they simply reward different styles of play.

The Hidden Cost of Each Side

It is worth pricing both choices honestly. A Mending bow shifts the cost onto arrows: each one takes flint, a stick, and a feather to craft, so sustained archery means running a chicken supply, mining gravel, or trading with a fletcher villager. An Infinity bow shifts the cost onto the bow itself: you will periodically spend levels and a fresh bow at the anvil, and eventually retire it entirely when repairs become too expensive. Whichever resource your world produces more easily — arrows or enchanted bows — is usually the side of the debate you should land on.