Mending Villager Cost: The Real Emerald Price of a Mending Book

The short answer: 10 to 38 emeralds, plus a book

A librarian sells a Mending book for 10 to 38 emeralds and one book at full price. Not 5 to 64 — that wider figure is the range for enchanted books in general, and it is the number most pages quote because it is the number printed on the librarian’s trade row. Mending’s own range is narrower, and it is derivable rather than folklore.

The librarian’s book price is a formula. A normal enchantment costs from 2 + 3 × level to 6 + 13 × level emeralds; a treasure enchantment costs double that, so 4 + 6 × level to 12 + 26 × level. Mending is a treasure enchantment, and its maximum level is I. Substitute level = 1 and you get 4 + 6 = 10 at the low end and 12 + 26 = 38 at the high end. That is the whole derivation, and it is why the 64-emerald cap you hear about never bites for Mending: at level I the formula cannot reach it.

The price for a given villager is rolled once, when the trade is created, and then it is fixed for that villager. So two librarians standing next to each other can be 28 emeralds apart on the same book, and there is nothing to do about it except look at the next one.

What actually moves the price

The rolled price is only the starting point. Java subtracts a discount derived from your reputation with that specific villager, multiplied by that specific trade’s price multiplier — and the enchanted-book trade’s multiplier is 0.2, against 0.05 on the librarian’s paper, book and ink sac trades. That single number is why book prices collapse so dramatically and ordinary trades barely move.

Reputation itself comes from a published gossip table: curing a zombie villager grants a permanent gossip worth 20 at a multiplier of 5, plus a temporary one worth 25 at a multiplier of 1; trading grants 2 per trade up to a cap of 25. Multiply out, take 0.2 of the total, round down, and you have the emeralds off. The table below does that arithmetic for each state a librarian can be in.

The row that matters is the fourth one. The permanent part of a cure is worth 20 emeralds off this trade forever, which turns the worst roll in the range, at 38 emeralds, into one costing 18 — and takes any roll at or below 21 down to a single emerald. The extra 5 emeralds you see immediately after the cure are the temporary half of the gossip, which decays by 1 every 20 minutes until it is gone.

One more lever exists. The Hero of the Village effect, from ending a raid, cuts 30% of the initial price at level I and 55% at level V, and it does not go through the price multiplier. Stacked on a cured librarian at level V it takes every Mending book in the range down to 1 emerald. That is the floor; there is nothing below it, because the game refuses to price any trade at zero.

Which librarian, and at which level

Four of the five levels can carry a book trade — Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman and Expert. Master is the exception: it adds red and yellow candles rather than a fifth book. That does not stop a master librarian selling Mending, because levelling up adds trades without taking the old ones away — a Master that rolled Mending at Novice still has it.

Be precise about what levelling buys you, because it is easy to get backwards, and “four levels” is not the same as “four books”. A book slot is never guaranteed: the book competes for its level’s two slots — 67% at the first 3 levels and 50% at Expert, where the pool is four trades deep instead of three. Add those chances up and a librarian that climbs all the way to Expert has had about 2.5 book trades rolled, not four. So levelling does add chances — what it does not do is improve any single roll, because every book slot draws from the same enchantment pool at every level.

The catch is that levelling requires trading, and the first trade locks the villager’s offers in for good. So levelling is how you get more books out of a librarian you have already committed to; it is not how you hunt for Mending.

Hunting is the other move, and it runs the opposite way. The cheapest Mending librarian in the game is a Novice you have never traded with, because a villager that has not traded is still rerollable.

The fastest route to a Mending librarian

1. Place a lectern next to an unemployed adult villager. An unemployed villager takes the librarian job from an unclaimed lectern nearby.
2. Open its trades and look, but do not trade. A Novice librarian offers two of the three trades in its pool, one of which is the enchanted book, so you will not always even see a book on the first try.
3. No Mending? Break the lectern and place it again. Removing and replacing a job site block can alter the trades offered, and a villager with no experience resets its trades periodically on its own. A Novice villager that has never traded also reverts to unemployed while the block is gone, which is expected rather than a problem.
4. Repeat until the book you want appears. The enchantment is drawn from the tradeable pool with equal chances and the level is rolled afterwards, so this is a slot machine with a free lever, not a progression.
5. Then, and only then, trade. The moment you complete a single trade, the villager keeps its profession forever and its offers lock in. There is no undo.

Restocking is the other half of running the hall: a villager reactivates its sold-out trades up to twice a day, and only while it can reach and use its job site block. A lectern the librarian cannot path to is a librarian that never restocks.

The zombie cure, and the thing everyone gets wrong about it

Curing is the single largest discount in the game, and the mechanics are precise. Give the zombie villager the Weakness effect — a splash potion thrown by you, a dispenser or a witch, a lingering potion, an arrow of Weakness, or in Java the cloud from a creeper that was itself weakened — and then use a golden apple on it. It must be the plain golden apple; the enchanted one does not work. If you need the recipe, the Minecraft potion chart has it: Weakness is the one potion brewed straight from a water bottle with a fermented spider eye, no nether wart required.

Conversion takes a random 3,600 to 6,000 ticks, which is 3 to 5 minutes. Iron bars and beds speed it up: the game checks a 9×9×9 cube around the villager and counts up to 14 of them, which shortens the countdown by about 4.2% on average. It is a real effect and a small one — worth building if the hall is permanent, not worth waiting on if it is not. During the conversion the villager keeps behaving like a zombie and gains Strength, so it is more dangerous mid-cure than before it.

Here is the part that is widely believed and no longer true: curing the same villager twice does not stack the discount. Reinfecting and re-curing a librarian used to multiply the reputation gain; that was fixed, and a villager now grants the curing gossip only the first time. The discount is permanent, so you do not need it to stack — but a hall built on repeatedly zombifying one librarian is doing work for nothing. Villagers standing near the cured one pick up a smaller share through gossip, and only the temporary half: the permanent gossip’s sharing cost is higher than its own maximum value, so it can never spread.

Why Mending has to come from a book

Treasure enchantments cannot be produced by an enchanting table at all, and they never appear on the enchanted equipment villagers sell. What they can appear on is a librarian’s enchanted book. That is the entire reason the librarian is the centre of every late-game base: it is not that its books are good value, it is that for Mending there is no competing supplier in the trade tables of the other 12 professions.

Which is also why the price feels strange. Nothing in the formula knows what an enchantment is worth to you — the emerald cost is derived from the enchantment’s LEVEL and its treasure status, and nothing else. So you are not paying more for Mending because it is better; you are paying whatever the formula rolled, for the only trade in the game that sells it. The villager trading chart has the librarian’s full table alongside the other 12 professions, and our ranking of every villager trade by the numbers shows where the book trade sits relative to everything else — which is to say, outside it, in an economy of its own.