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

If you’ve been in the Minecraft community for a while, you definitely know about this controversy. Mending and infinity are mutually exclusive enchantments, so you can’t have both on one bow. So the question is which of these enchantments should you apply to your bow? That’s what we will be answering in this guide. So, get ready to find out whether you should have mending or infinity on your Minecraft bow.

Mending Enchantment Explained

Mending is without a doubt a top-tier Minecraft enchantment. It makes your tools, weapons, and armor infinitely repairable. The same goes for when it’s applied to a bow in Minecraft.

Upon applying mending, whenever you gain XP and as long as you are holding this weapon in your main or off-hand, the XP orbs will automatically repair the bow as much as they can. So, if you have an XP farm of sorts, you can rest assured that your bow will last forever.

However, there is a downside to this OP ability. You cannot obtain mending through the enchanting table. It is a special treasure enchantment you can only get in the enchanted book form. So, trading with librarian villagers is one way of getting a mending enchanted book.

But this may not be a solution for too long depending on when the villager trade rebalancing will be officially implemented.

You can get mending in a couple of other ways too, like looting structures’ chests and fishing. But, as these methods are more RNG-based, it might take a while to get the enchanted book you want.

Infinity Enchantment Explained

Infinity is such a quality of life enchantment. It allows you to have just a single arrow (it has to be a regular arrow, as tipped and spectral arrows don’t work with infinity) in your inventory and fire as many times as you want.

Yeah, there is no need to carry stacks of arrows that take up valuable inventory space. You can just bring one arrow on your next adventure and kill as many mobs as the bow’s durability allows.

The obvious disadvantage to infinity is that, well, the bow simply won’t last forever. You’ll be able to repair it by combining it with another bow in an anvil until the XP price says, “Too Expensive!” If you encounter this text, it means you can no longer repair the bow, and you’ll have to say goodbye to it.

You can pretty easily get the infinity enchantment in Minecraft, though. It is a regular enchantment, so the enchanting table can offer it to you. You can also get it in the enchanted book form by trading with villagers, looting, and fishing. So you’re far more likely to find infinity than mending.

Which Bow Enchantment Should You Use?

Now that you’re familiar with both mending and infinity, let’s see which one should you put on your bow in Minecraft. As with many other choice features in the game, it’s up to you and your personal preference. Mending enchantment will allow you to infinitely repair the bow, whereas infinity will provide you with unlimited damage opportunities.

If you’ve got amazing enchantments through the enchanting table and don’t have a villager trading hall, nor are planning to make one, mending is definitely the enchantment you should have on your bow. This will simply allow you to keep those enchantments without having to worry about getting lucky once again while enchanting.

But then, you’re forced to bring stacks of arrows with you if you’re using the bow regularly. Not only that, but you will also need to pay attention to your aim. Since you won’t have many arrows, you will need to make them count.

On the other side, if you’ve got access to any enchanted book through the villager trading hall, then infinity is certainly the better option. Basically, there is no need to get attached to a particular bow, so it doesn’t have to last forever. If one breaks, you only need some XP and a new OP bow is ready for use.

This would also mean your inventory is far cleaner and your shots don’t need to be all that precise. Furthermore, with unbreaking, your infinity bow will last for quite a long time, so unless you use it like crazy, you won’t need to replace it very often.

Because of these facts, most players choose to put infinity on their Minecraft bow instead of mending. However, that might be the case for now. As we already mentioned, villager trades are not balanced, so Mojang is deciding how to improve them. The current optional solution is to have librarian enchanted book trades depending on the biome the villager is from. So, you would be able to buy a mending book from a swamp villager and the infinity book from a desert villager.

These changes would completely alter the way people play the game and get enchantments. Thus, perhaps not everyone would want to spend a whole bunch of time and resources making a trading hall in every biome.

That’s why mending enchantment would be so much more valuable than infinity on a bow. Since the enchantments are not easily accessible, players will value the enchantments they have greatly. You’d get attached to a bow because it was difficult to make it good. Therefore, mending will perhaps be a far better option than infinity with the changes to villager trading going live.

And that’s a wrap for this article. As you can assume, there is no specific rule as to whether mending or infinity is better on a bow in Minecraft. Both of them are fairly useful and provide a different style of gameplay.

If you believe infinity is too good, then allowing yourself to have only mending on a bow might seem like a good challenge. And if you don’t want to think about aiming and preserving your arrows, then infinity is the enchantment you want. With that said, what do you think? Do you prefer mending or infinity on your bow? Let us know in the comments below!