How To Repair A Bow In Minecraft [Explained]

Learning how to repair a bow in Minecraft, or any piece of equipment really, is an extremely important part of this game. It may not seem like a particularly necessary feature during your first few hours in the world, but as you go through the game and acquire or craft more powerful gear, you’ll start to understand its importance.

How To Repair A Bow In Minecraft 

Now there are two main methods through which you can repair your gear in Minecraft.

One is extremely straightforward and only requires the use of the Crafting Table. This is one of the most crucial items in the entire experience, and you are not able to progress through the game without it.

The other method is a bit more complicated since it necessitates the use of an Anvil. This is a completely avoidable item that requires a significant amount of resources to craft, but the benefits speak for themselves.

We’ll go over both of these in detail below.

How to Repair Bow With Grindstone 

• Repairing Bows with a Grindstone requires having one in your inventory or crafting it.
• You need two identical bows for this method.
• Place the damaged bow in the top box and the other one in the bottom box of the Grindstone.
• The Grindstone combines them into a stronger, repaired bow in the right box.
• Retrieve the repaired bow, but note that using this method removes enchantments

The Crafting Table Method

The most basic way of repairing damaged gear is to place two similar items on a Crafting Table at the same time. This allows you to combine their durability, as well as gain a slight bonus to it in the final combined product.

• Combine two extremely damaged Bows in a Crafting Table to repair them.
• The repaired Bow retains the combined durability of the original items plus a 5% repair bonus.
• Enchantments from the damaged items are not transferred to the repaired Bow using this method

The Anvil Method

This method does allow us to carry forward enchantments, but you have to acquire an Anvil first. You can craft one of these by yourself with 3x Blocks of Iron and 4x Iron Ingots. However, this is quite an ask if you’re short on Iron.

You can alternatively also take one of these from any village on the map. You can find them inside some of the homes there, and you can pick one up by mining it with an Iron Pickaxe. Also, don’t worry, villagers don’t turn hostile if you take their items.

Once you have an Anvil in your possession, place it in your base and get ready to start repairing. Now there are two distinct ways you can repair items with this crafting station,

1. Repairing with Materials.
2. Repairing with a Duplicate.

The first of these requires raw materials from the relevant class. We’ll list all of these in the table below:

Putting a damaged item in the Anvil with one unit of its compatible repair material, allows you to restore 25% of its overall durability. So for an item that is almost gone, that comes to a total of around four units of materials.

Sometimes this can be more than, or equal to, the original cost of crafting the actual item. So assess your situation, and make sure that repairing is worth the loss of materials. Sometimes it’s better to simply move on and craft something new.

You might also have to hunt animals like Llamas for resources like Leather, so make sure to check out our guide on that particular animal here.

The second way of repairing an item with an Anvil is to add another of the exact same type within it in the crafting station. This works almost exactly like the Crafting Table method, except you actually get to carry over enchantments now.

This was eXputer’s ‘How To Repair A Bow guide. Repairing a bow is simple, but it might be a bit confusing if you are a beginner. If you want to repair an ordinary bow, then a crafting table is a better option. However, if you want to repair a broken enchanted bow, you should use the Anvil. While you’re here, why not also check out our article on How To Tame A Parrot In Minecraft?