Anvil

"Anvils! Your sword can now be a "Dragon's Tooth" if you want, or you could just repair it a little."

- The Pretty Scary Update promo poster

An anvil is a block that allows players to repair items, rename items, and combine enchantments.

Obtaining
Anvils can be mined using any pickaxe. If mined without a pickaxe they drop nothing.

Natural generation
A damaged anvil will generate in the "Forge room" of the woodland mansion.

Repairing and renaming items
Anvils have two modes to repair items that have a durability rating:
 * As with the grindstone, a player may repair items by combining two similar items. With the anvil, however, the target will keep its enchantments and may gain new ones from the sacrificed item.
 * Alternatively, a player can use materials originally required in the crafting of the item (iron ingots for iron items with durability, diamonds for diamond items with durability) to repair a single item. One material can only repair 25% of the target's maximum durability.

In addition, the player can rename any item - not just items with durability - by using an anvil.

Repairing


Repairing with materials works for the most part, but not with all items: As a rule of thumb, repairing works for items with their material in the default name. For example, an anvil can repair an iron pickaxe with materials (iron in this case) while an anvil cannot repair bows or shears except with other bows or shears. As a special case, chain armor can be repaired with iron ingots, turtle shells can be repaired with scutes, and elytra can be repaired with phantom membranes. The repair does not need to be complete; one material will only repair $1/4$ of the item's maximum durability.

Repairing with a matching item works for any item with durability including bows, shears and so on. The items must match in type. For example, a golden pickaxe cannot combine with an iron one.

Note that in both cases the resulting durability will be limited to the item's maximum, and there is no discount for "over-repair".

As a subset of repairing one item with another, the anvil can transfer enchantments from the sacrifice to the target. This can have a synergistic effect when both items share identical enchantments, or simply add to each other when they do not. Two Sharpness II swords can be combined to make a Sharpness III sword, for example, or a pickaxe with Efficiency can be combined with one that has Unbreaking. This can produce enchantments and combinations that could not be made by using an enchanting table. But even so, some enchantments cannot be combined if they are similar, or contradicting, in terms of what they do. If the target is damaged, you will pay for the repair as well as the transfer.

Transferring high-level enchantments is more expensive, and renaming an item has an additional surcharge. The anvil has a limit of 39 levels, beyond which it will refuse to repair altogether. This limit is not present in Creative mode.

Renaming
Any item or stack of items can be renamed at a cost of one level plus any prior-work penalty. If the player is only renaming, the maximum total cost is 39 levels. The maximum length for renaming is 35 characters. Some items have special effects when renamed:
 * A name tag must be renamed before it can be used.
 * A renamed weapon will show the name in the death message upon killing another player.
 * A renamed spawn egg will produce a mob with the same name.
 * Chests, trapped chests, shulker boxes, furnaces, hoppers, droppers, dispensers, minecarts with chests, minecarts with hoppers, enchantment tables, and brewing stands will display the name in their GUI when placed. Renamed command blocks will use their name in chat messages instead of.

Any name changes to items are applied to the data tag. Similarly this data tag can be accessed by the  argument using target selectors.

Enchanted books
Enchanted books are used to enchant tools. Enchanted books themselves can be combined to create higher tiered books.

Falling anvils
When there are air blocks below an anvil, the latter will fall, in the same way sand, gravel, concrete powder and dragon eggs do. A placed anvil cannot be pushed or pulled by pistons, but a falling anvil can. This is different in Bedrock Edition where anvils can be pushed and pulled by pistons. Anvils will make a metallic clang sound when they land.

When anvils fall on a player or mob, it will damage them. The damage amount depends on fall distance: per block fallen after the first (e.g., an anvil that falls 4 blocks will deal  damage). The damage is capped at, no matter how far the anvil falls. Wearing a helmet will reduce the damage by $1/4$, but this will cost durability on the helmet. When a player dies by an anvil falling on them, the chat will display the message: "*Player name* was squashed by a falling anvil." However if a player is merely touched by an anvil entity or falling anvil, no damage will result until the falling anvil becomes a solid anvil-block in the airspace where the player is located. Falling anvils can be manipulated by TNT cannons, and will pass right through a mob or player without damaging them.

Anvils landing on item entities will destroy them.

Maps
In Bedrock Edition, an anvil can be used instead of a crafting table to zoom a map out, to clone a map, or to place a player position marker on a map.

Becoming damaged
With each use, an anvil has a 12% chance to become damaged – degrading one stage at a time, first becoming chipped, then damaged, then eventually destroyed. On average, an anvil will survive for 25 uses, which is approximately one use per 1.24 iron ingots used in crafting the anvil.

An anvil can be damaged and destroyed from falling as well: if it falls from a height greater than 1 block, the chance of degrading by one stage is 5% × the number of blocks fallen.

The damage state does not affect the anvil's function, but only anvils of the same damage state will stack in inventory.

In the Legacy Console Edition, damaged anvils that are broken using a pickaxe then placed again are completely repaired, because damaged and very damaged anvils do not exist as items.

Block data
In Bedrock Edition, anvils use the following data values:

Trivia

 * The falling ability of the anvil is a reference to the common cartoon trope.
 * The anvil has the same blast resistance as obsidian and the enchantment table.
 * If a material is renamed, such as diamonds, it will not stack with unnamed or differently-named items.
 * For unenchanted items, "unit repair" can easily cost more material than just crafting a new item or combining damaged items. The exception is armor, where players can use less material at the cost of experience levels.
 * If placed on top of exploding TNT blocks, the explosion won't affect the surrounding area.
 * This is because the anvil falls into the space the TNT entity is occupying, and since the TNT's explosion power is not high enough to destroy the anvil, no blocks are destroyed.
 * Anvils are also commonly used as a guillotine because of its ability to kill mobs/players as a controlled entity.
 * If an anvil is placed on top of a chest, you are still able to open the chest.