You disenchant items in Minecraft with a grindstone: place the enchanted item in either top slot, take the plain copy from the output slot, and the grindstone drops some experience as payment. It removes every enchantment except curses, keeps the item’s durability and name, and resets the anvil cost the item has built up. Below we cover the grindstone recipe, the exact steps, what survives, how much experience you get back, and the one thing a grindstone can’t do: save the enchantment.
This guide is current for Minecraft Java Edition 26.3 and Bedrock Edition 26.50 (Wilderness Bound, released September 15, 2026). The grindstone arrived with the Village and Pillage update (Java 1.14) and works almost identically on both editions; the small differences are noted below.
How to Get a Grindstone
Craft one from 2 sticks, 1 stone slab and 2 wooden planks of any type. Per the community wiki, the layout is:
| Row | Left | Middle | Right |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top | Stick | Stone slab | Stick |
| Middle | Planks | Empty | Planks |
| Bottom | Empty | Empty | Empty |
You can also take one from a village. Grindstones are the weaponsmith’s job site block, so they generate inside weaponsmith houses, and the wiki notes they turn up in trail ruins too. Mine one with any pickaxe; without a pickaxe it drops nothing.
Placement barely matters on Java, where a grindstone needs no supporting block. On Bedrock it breaks if it loses its support or ends up in water, per the wiki.
How to Disenchant an Item Step by Step
- Open the grindstone. Right-click it on PC, or press LT on Xbox, L2 on PlayStation or ZL on Switch. On mobile, tap it.
- Put the enchanted item in either of the two top slots. A clean copy appears in the output slot.
- Take the output. The original is consumed and the grindstone drops experience orbs.
It works on any enchanted tool, weapon, armor piece or book. An enchanted book comes out as a plain book, ready to be enchanted again at an enchanting table.
If the arrow shows a red cross, the item can’t be ground. On Java that means it has no enchantments. On Bedrock, per the community wiki, an unenchanted item that has been through an anvil can still go in, which clears its anvil penalty.
What the Grindstone Removes and What It Keeps
| Removed | Kept |
|---|---|
| Every normal enchantment | Curse of Binding and Curse of Vanishing |
| The anvil’s prior work penalty | The item’s durability |
| Any custom name |
Curses are the big exception. Mojang’s list of all enchantments describes Curse of Binding as keeping an item stuck in your armor slot until death or breakage, and Curse of Vanishing as destroying the item when you die. The grindstone won’t touch either, so a cursed item stays cursed.
The penalty reset matters more than it sounds. Every anvil use makes the next one pricier, which is how items reach the “Too Expensive!” limit covered in our guide to enchanted books. Grinding an item wipes that history, so it can take a fresh set of books from zero.
How Much Experience You Get Back
The refund is partial and random. Per the community wiki, the grindstone drops between half and all of a value the game assigns to each enchantment and level, and curses count for nothing. The wiki’s example is a Sharpness V sword, which returns about 35 experience points on average. That’s points, not levels, so treat it as a bonus rather than a way to farm levels.
Junk loot is where this pays off. Enchanted bows and armor dropped by mobs, enchanted fishing rods from fishing, and low-level loot from chests are worth grinding for the experience instead of throwing away.
Repairing Two Items at Once
The grindstone doubles as a repair station. Put two of the same item in the top slots and you get one item with both durabilities added together plus a 5% bonus, up to the item’s maximum. The catch: the result has no enchantments (curses excepted), and experience only drops if either input was enchanted.
The crafting grid does the same combine, per the community wiki, but it gives no experience back, so the grindstone is the better choice for enchanted items.
If You Want to Keep the Enchantments
A grindstone destroys enchantments; it never moves them anywhere. There’s no way in the base game to pull an enchantment off an item and onto a book.
What you can do is move them to another item of the same type. Put a fresh item in the first slot of an anvil and the old enchanted one in the second, and the new item inherits the old one’s enchantments along with the leftover durability. It costs levels, but for a worn-out diamond pickaxe with Fortune III it beats grinding it down and gambling on the table rolling Fortune III again. A new diamond pickaxe still takes three diamonds, so see where diamonds generate before you commit, or repair the old one with diamonds directly in the anvil, which also keeps its enchantments.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you disenchant an item into a book? No. The grindstone deletes the enchantments and hands back only experience. To keep them, merge the old item into a new one of the same type at an anvil.
Is there a disenchanting table in Minecraft? No, the grindstone is the disenchanting block. Disenchanting tables and “disenchanter” blocks come from mods, not the base game.
Can a grindstone remove Curse of Binding? No. Curse of Binding and Curse of Vanishing survive both the grindstone and crafting-grid repairs, so a cursed item stays cursed for good.
Does disenchanting reset the anvil cost? Yes. The grindstone clears an item’s prior work penalty, so the next anvil job starts at the base cost.
Can you remove just one enchantment? Not in the base game. The grindstone strips every non-curse enchantment at once, so plan to reapply the ones you wanted with books. Every other guide is on our Minecraft hub.