Enchanting Table

An enchanting table is a block that allows players to spend their experience point levels to enchant tools, weapons, books, armor, and certain other items.

Breaking
An enchanting table requires a pickaxe to be mined, in which case it drops itself. If mined without a pickaxe, then the mining is slower and it drops nothing.

Usage
The enchanting table is $$ blocks high.

An enchanting table cannot be moved by pistons. If an enchanting table is placed on ice, the player slides on it as though it is an ice block, just like with slabs.

Despite being comprised largely of obsidian, they are not immune to destruction by the ender dragon, which Mojang has confirmed to be intentional.

Enchanting


The enchanting table's main purpose is to enchant items. The table can enchant all tools, armor and gear except shears, flint and steel, carrot on a stick, shield, carved pumpkin, mob head, lead and horse armor; all of these (excluding leads and horse armor) can instead be enchanted using an anvil and an appropriate enchanted book.

When a bookshelf is placed next to an enchanting table (with one block of air in between) it increases the maximum enchantment level. There must be 15 bookshelves around the enchanting table in order to obtain the maximum enchantment level of 30. See enchantment mechanics for more specific details.

Light source
Enchanting tables emit a light level of 12.

Standard Galactic Alphabet
The arcane glyphs that float from bookshelves to the enchanting table and the cryptic runes in the enchanting 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 arcane glyphs cannot be seen if "particles" in the video settings is set to "minimal".

The cryptic runes seen in the interface are randomly constructed from the following list of words:

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

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 purely cosmetic: they have no relation to the enchantments to be applied to the item and are not saved on the enchanted item (meaning they say nothing about the spell's identity), and they are displayed only in the enchanting table. Only the cost and one of the enchantments are known.

Bookshelves
Bookshelves are used to boost the level of enchantments you can get, which the max is 30.

Custom name
By default, the GUI of an enchanting table is labeled "Enchant", but this name can be customized by naming the enchanting table in an anvil before placing it or by changing the  tag using the  command.

ID




Block entity
An enchanting table has a block entity associated with it that holds additional data about the block.

Trivia



 * The enchanting table actually produces the particles emitted from the bookshelves. These particles originate inside the enchanting 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.
 * Enchanting tables are mostly made of obsidian, and thus have a blast resistance of 1,200 and cannot be destroyed by TNT, although they can still be mined by any pickaxes.
 * 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
 * When the player is invisible, the enchanting table can still "see" the player and open up.
 * On the enchantment screen, captions in the Standard Galactic Alphabet includes several in-jokes:
 * On October 1, 2011, Notch tweeted an image of the enchantment screen, with enchantments . The first enchantment translates into "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".
 * Three of the possible words for enchantments are "the elder scrolls," likely a joke at Bethesda, creator of "The Elder Scrolls" series and whose parent company, Zenimax, attempted to sue Mojang for the name of their game Scrolls.
 * The words "klaatu berata niktu" are a (misspelled) reference to "Klaatu barada nikto", a phrase that originates from the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still and has been since used as a reference in many other movies, cartoons and games.
 * Similarly, "Xyzzy" is a magic spell in the game "Colossal Cave Adventure" and has been used in several other games as an Easter Egg or cheat code.
 * The word "embiggen" is a fictional word coined by The Simpsons quote: "A Noble Spirit Embiggens the Smallest Man".
 * The words "phnglui mglwnafh cthulhu rlyeh wgahnagl fhtagnbaguette" are a quote from H. P. Lovecraft's short story "The Call of Cthulhu," apart from the extra "baguette" at the end. Said quote is a prayer in the Cthulhu mythos. The complete and correct quote is "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn", which translates to "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
 * Of the list of words that the enchanting table uses, none of the words contain the letters "J" or "Q". Although they are not used in the words, they do have a symbol attached to them, and can be seen moving from the bookshelf and the table.