How to repair tools, armor, and weapons in Minecraft

Since Minecraft is a survival game, one of the most important things for its players to do is create tools to collect resources, weapons to fight off enemies, and armor to stay safe from threats. Keeping these items well maintained is essential for smooth and successful survival worlds. Thankfully, all of them can be repaired to keep their durability high.

Everything you need to know about the repair process can be found detailed below.

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How to repair tools, armor, and weapons by combining them

1) Find two of the same item

A player with two damaged gold shovels (Image via Mojang)

The simplest way to repair tools, armor, and weapons is by combining them. You'll need two damaged items that are exactly the same. You can't combine stone and iron pickaxes to repair them; it would need to be two stone or two iron pickaxes.

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2) Combine them

Combining items does remove enchantments (Image via Mojang)

Actually repairing the two items is simple. Simply open your inventory or use a crafting table. Place both items within the crafting interface.

This will restore durability to them, but it will also remove Minecraft enchantments at the same time. For this reason, the combining method isn't recommended.

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How to repair tools, armor, and weapons with an anvil in Minecraft

1) Grab a damaged tool, armor, or weapon

Thankfully, damaged tools aren't hard to get (Image via Mojang)

Before you can repair a tool, armor, or weapon, you'll need to damage it. Take some time mining or killing Minecraft mobs to wear down the tools, weapons, and armor you're currently using.

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2) Find the repair material

A player about to use a gold ingot to repair a gold shovel (Image via Mojang)

Now that you've tracked down an item to repair, you'll need to find the needed materials. If a tool, weapon, or piece of armor is made primarily of a single material, then that's what's needed to repair it. For example, wooden tools need wood, iron armor needs iron, and diamond weapons need diamonds.

However, there are four items that take more specific items. The first of these are shields, which need wood rather than iron to maintain. Turtle shells need turtle scutes to stay durable; Elytra use phantom membranes as repair materials; and the new Minecraft mace needs breeze rods.

Alternatively, two of the exact same items can be combined in an anvil to repair them, similar to the crafting method mentioned previously.

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3) Repair the item with an anvil

Using an anvil to repair a gold shovel (Image via Mojang)

Actually repairing an item is quite simple. Place the damaged piece of Minecraft armor, weapon, or tool in the leftmost anvil slot, and the required repair item in the middle anvil slot.

A repaired version of the damaged item should appear in the anvil's output crafting slot. Simply grab it out of the interface to finalize the repair.