Minecraft Enchantment Calculator

What the game will and will not let you stack

The limits above are the ones Minecraft enforces. These are the reasons behind them, and the places where a command quietly does something different from an anvil.

1. 1

   Only one damage enchantment per weapon

   Sharpness, Smite, Bane of Arthropods, Breach and Density all exclude each other, so a sword gets exactly one of the three it can take and a mace gets one of its four. Sharpness is the all-rounder; Smite out-damages it by a wide margin against undead, which on most servers means a zombie or skeleton farm rather than general play.

2. 2

   And only one Protection

   Protection, Fire Protection, Blast Protection and Projectile Protection are mutually exclusive on the same piece. Plain Protection reduces most damage types, so it is the default pick unless a specific piece has a specific job — Blast Protection on a kit you only wear near creepers or beds in the Nether.

3. 3

   Riptide is the odd one out, not part of a group

   It is tempting to treat trident enchantments as one pick-one group, but they are not. Riptide excludes Channeling and it excludes Loyalty, while Channeling and Loyalty sit together on the same trident quite happily. A throwing trident can have both; a Riptide trident can have neither, because it never leaves your hand.

4. 4

   Infinity and Mending cannot share a bow

   Infinity stops arrows being consumed, Mending repairs the item with collected experience, and the two have excluded each other since 1.11.1. Mending wins for a bow you use constantly and never want to re-craft; Infinity wins if arrows, not durability, are the thing you keep running out of.

5. 5

   Half of these never come from an enchanting table

   Mending, Frost Walker, Soul Speed, Swift Sneak and both curses cannot be rolled at a table on any item — they come from loot, trading or piglin bartering, then go on via an anvil and a book. The badge on each row above says which case you are in, which is usually the reason someone is looking for a command in the first place.

6. 6

   /enchant enforces the rules, /give does not

   The wiki is explicit that /enchant is "subject to the same restrictions as an anvil" and will fail on a conflict or an over-maximum level. /give writes the component straight onto the item, so it will happily produce Sharpness 255 or a fishing rod with Protection IV. This tool holds you to the legitimate limits so that both outputs work — if you want the silly version, edit the copied command by hand.