How to Make and Use a Grindstone in Minecraft

The use of enchantments in Minecraft is pretty much the best thing for upgrading your gear in-game. Until it isn’t. Thanks to the rigidity of the game’s mechanics, you can’t put anything better on your gear once you have used one enchantment on it. This leaves players in a tricky situation when they find better enchantments but have no non-enchanted gear to use it on. If you have been in that situation, you just need to learn how to make and use a grindstone in Minecraft to solve this problem. And well, that’s not all. This multi-purpose utility block can do a variety of things for you and your gear. But let’s not jump ahead of ourselves and first discover how you can make a grindstone in Minecraft.

Make a Grindstone in Minecraft (2022)

Grindstone is a unique functional block that can help you repair equipment and disenchant them as well. It also doubles as a job site block for villagers with jobs in Minecraft. Let’s understand how to obtain and use the grindstone in Minecraft Java and Bedrock.

Why Do You Need a Grindstone in Minecraft?

Grindstone is a powerful block that allows you to repair your tools and equipment. This block does so by combining two items of the same material and adding up their overall durability. While doing so, grindstone also adds bonus durability to the repaired item, which varies according to the material the item is made up of. You can find a detailed table of all item durability bonuses on Minecraft Wiki.

In addition to repairing, the grindstone block also allows you to disenchant enchanted items by combining them with other enchanted or non-enchanted items. Though, a grindstone can’t remove curses in Minecraft, including the Curse of Vanishing and the Curse of Binding. However, if you wish to learn how to remove enchantments in Minecraft, refer to our dedicated article on this topic.

Grindstone As a Job Site Block

Apart from its main purposeas a repair and disenchantment block, the grindstone also functions as a job site block for villagers. If you are breeding villagers in Minecraft, you can use it to assign or change their job to that of a weaponsmith.

Materials Required to Make a Grindstone

To craft a grindstone in Minecraft, you only require three items. The main ingredients for the crafting recipe of a grindstone are:

• 2 Sticks
• 2 Planks (any wood)
• 1 Stone Slab

You can get four wooden planks by placing a wooden log anywhere on your crafting table in Minecraft. We just need two planks to make a grindstone. Meanwhile, you can place the other two planks vertically next to each other in the crafting area to get two sticks. Now, all that’s left to learn is how to make stone slabs.

How to Get a Stone Slab

Follow the steps below to get cobblestone blocks, which you can smelt to make a stone slab in Minecraft. Here’s how the process goes:

1. First, collect 3 cobblestone blocks in Minecraft by breaking them with a wooden pickaxe.

2. Then, use a furnace in Minecraft to smelt the cobblestone into stone blocks. You can use additional wooden planks as fuel.

3. Finally, use a stonecutter or place the three stone blocks in the bottommost cells of the crafting area to turn them into stone slabs. We only need one stone slab to make a grindstone in Minecraft.

How to Make a Grindstone in Minecraft

After collecting the ingredients, you need to combine them on the crafting table to make a grindstone in Minecraft.

To do so, you first need to place the sticks in the corner slots to the top row of the crafting area and then place a plank beneath each stick in the second row. These planks don’t have to be of the same type of wood. Finally, place the stone slab in the middle cell of the top row to finish the recipe.

Once the grindstone is ready, you have to place it on a solid block to use it. We recommend you do so inside a village, so that you can also get a weaponsmith villager without any effort.

How to Use a Grindstone in Minecraft

Now that you know how to make a grindstone in Minecraft, it’s time to figure out how to use this block. But before that, you need to learn a few basic mechanics this block follows:

• A grindstone in Minecraft features two input slots where you can put items to combine them to get additional durability and remove enchantments.
• You can’t use it to combine two non-identical items (like a pickaxe and a sword) and neither can you use it to combine items made of different materials (like a diamond sword and a wooden sword).
• Other than combining the durability of placed items, the grindstone also provides bonus durability depending upon the material of the items.
• Lastly, even though you have to place two items on the grindstone to make it work, the final result is always a single item.

Unlike most utility blocks, the grindstone has more than one function and they depend upon the combination of items put into it. Let’s understand this concept with a few use cases.

Enchanted Item + Enchanted Item

If you place two enchanted items in a grindstone in Minecraft, the result will always be a non-enchanted item. Depending upon the number and level of enchantments, you also get some experience alongside the output item. Not to forget, you don’t get any experience if the enchantments on your items are curses as they can’t be removed with a grindstone.

Enchanted Item + Non-Enchanted Item

If you combine an enchanted item with a non-enchanted item on the grindstone, the output will be again a non-enchanted item. However, if the enchanted item had a curse on it, it will automatically get applied to the output item. The resulting item will still have the curse, and you will have an enchanted item at your disposal.

In either case, you will get some experience based on the number and level of enchantments on the item. And the output will have the combined durability of the two items.

Non-Enchanted Item + Non-Enchanted Item

Combining two non-enchanted items is the simplest way to use a grindstone in Minecraft. The result of the combination of the two input items doesn’t have any enchantments, and it doesn’t give any experience either. Instead, you just get an item that has the combined durability of the two items along with additional bonus durability.

Use Grindstone in Minecraft to Repair Your Gear

With that, you now have another powerful tool at your disposal that you can use to repair your items and disenchant them in no time. You can use also our guide that covers how to remove enchantments in Minecraft to get more alternatives. Once your item is enchantment free, you can use enchanted books in Minecraft to use new enchantments. Moreover, our dedicated list of best Minecraft enchantments can help you figure out which enchantments to choose and avoid during your gameplay. With that said, do you think grindstone is a useful block in Minecraft? Tell us in the comments below!