Enchanting Table

An enchantment table is a block that allows players to enchant certain tools, and armor. Enchanting works in three stages. Each enchantment costs the player experience levels but in return grants useful enhancements to armor and tools. The sprites and icons of enchanted items have a purple luminescence.

The table will enchant swords, bows, shovels, pickaxes, and axes made of wood, stone, iron, gold, and diamond, as well as all armor. The hoe, bucket, shears, fishing rod and flint and steel cannot be enchanted by the enchantment table and require an anvil and an appropriate enchanted book.

If the table is surrounded by bookshelves, with one block of air in between, arcane glyphs float from the bookshelves into the book (if particles are turned on). Having bookshelves near an enchantment table will increase the potency of enchantments.

The enchantment table is $3/4$ blocks high.

Crafting
The ingredients for an enchantment table can also be found in villages. Obsidian and diamonds can be found in village chests, and a book can be obtained by breaking the bookshelves in a library. Collecting these resources from villages may be less time consuming than cultivation and mining, depending on world seed.

Usage


When the player right-clicks on an enchantment table, they are presented with a blank enchanting screen with a slot to place an item to be enchanted and three buttons. After the player places an item in the enchanting slot, the three buttons display cryptic runes and numbers. The numbers are experience level costs that are randomly chosen based on the number of bookshelves placed around the enchantment table (the more bookshelves, the higher the numbers that will be offered). Removing the item and replacing it in the slot will re-randomize the numbers offered.

To enchant the item, the player chooses one of the three numbers offered (the runes displayed have no effect on the enchanting process and can be ignored), that amount is subtracted from the player's experience level, and one or more random enchantments are placed on the item (the higher the number chosen, the more likely that multiple high-level enchantments will be added).

A normal table can only enchant up to a experience level cost of 8, but surrounding the table with up to 15 bookshelves will increase the power up to a maximum of 30.

Standard Galactic Alphabet
The arcane glyphs that float from bookshelves to the enchanting table and the cryptic runes in the enchantment table's interface are written in the Standard Galactic Alphabet, which is a simple alphabet substitution cipher used in the Commander Keen series of computer games.



The runes are randomly constructed from the following list of words:

the elder scrolls klaatu berata niktu xyzzy bless curse light darkness fire air earth water hot dry cold wet ignite snuff embiggen twist shorten stretch fiddle destroy imbue galvanize enchant free limited range of towards inside sphere cube self other ball mental physical grow shrink demon elemental spirit animal creature beast humanoid undead fresh stale

Three to five words are chosen from the list and appended to each other, then displayed in the Standard Galactic Alphabet. The words chosen are random and are purely cosmetic: they have no relation to the enchantments that will be applied to the item and are not saved on the enchanted item (meaning they will tell you nothing about what the resulting spell will be), and they are only displayed in the enchantment table.

History
Notch first tweeted about the enchantment table on September 30th 2011.

Trivia



 * Only 15 bookshelves are now required to achieve the maximum enchantments (lowered from 30 prior to update 1.3). Creating these bookshelves from scratch will require a total of 45 pieces of leather, 135 pieces of sugar cane (two stacks plus 7), and 23 logs of wood (with 2 planks left over) — not counting the 1 leather and 3 cane for the book on the enchantment table itself.
 * According to the first image that Notch posted of the enchantment table, they were originally crafted with cobblestone instead of obsidian.
 * Notch commented on Reddit "Oh, it's more magical than that! It automatically opens up and turns towards players who get close to it. When nobody is around, the book is closed and spins slowly."
 * Notch comments on other book animations. "Yes, the pages flip randomly every now and then."
 * On October 1st 2011, Notch tweeted an image of the enchantment screen, with enchantments written in the Standard Galactic Alphabet. The first enchantment translates onto "Well Played Internets You Are Good", the second translated into "These Names Will Be Random And Confusing", and the third translates to "Each Spell Costs Experience Levels". The Standard Galactic Alphabet or SGA was originally created by Tom Hall for use in the Commander Keen series of computer games.
 * Although the bottom texture would at first glance appear to be the obsidian texture, it is in fact slightly different.
 * Clicking on an item in the enchantment slot, with an identical item or any stack of two or more items allows you to quickly cycle through available spells without the item being removed from the enchantment slot. This keeps you from having to click twice.
 * A convenient way to block the effect of nearby bookshelves to obtain low-level enchantments is to place torches between the bookshelves and the enchantment table. Any other block will also work.
 * Enchantments were disabled in Beta 1.9 Pre-release 3's SMP. If a player attempted to enchant an item, it appeared enchanted for the client, but updated with the un-enchanted status once the player logged out and then back in again.
 * On a Beta 1.9 pre-release 3 server, if an enchantment table was broken and replaced with another Tile Entity block, the enchantment table's book would continue to be rendered on the client, and activating it would crash the client.
 * Breaking the enchantment table without using a pickaxe will not yield a block.
 * By replacing the alternate.png with a copy of the font.png renamed to match the original file, you can read the enchantments in English.
 * When sneaking on the Enchantment Table, you can walk off its edge, due to being less than 1 block high.
 * The enchantment table actually produces the particles emitted from the bookshelves. These particles originate inside the Enchantment table and are relocated to the bookshelf almost immediately, but travel slow enough to be briefly visible. The particle that enters and leaves the bookshelf is always the same "letter", but the ones traveling into the bookshelves are black.
 * Enchantment tables are mostly made of obsidian, and thus have a blast resistance of 6,000 and cannot be destroyed by TNT.
 * Strangely, even though it is made of obsidian, it doesn't require a Diamond Pickaxe to mine. In fact, it can be mined with any pickaxe.
 * Any enchantments before 1.9pre4 would show up as Feather Falling I.
 * Enchantment tables cannot be moved by pistons.
 * If an enchantment table is placed on ice, the player will slide on it as though it is an ice block, just like slabs.
 * If a slab is placed directly adjacent (not diagonally) to the enchantment table and the player walks from the slab onto the enchantment table the screen glitches briefly.
 * An easy way to list enchantments faster if you only have one item to enchant is to place the item you want to enchant into the enchanting table, then right- and left-click on it at the same time. This will pick the item up and place it immediately back down, resulting in a new list of possible enchantments. This also works by using a non-enchantable item such as food.
 * Enchanting tables are midway between slabs and full blocks height-wise, so they could be potentially used as a TNT cannon's range-amplifier instead of slabs or trapdoors
 * On Reddit, Jeb was asked on what he disliked most about minecraft, and what he would replace it with, he said: 1: I don't really like the enchanting system. 2: I don't know".