Enchantment Workbench

Pull enchantments off, copy them on, or evoke new ones — without spending XP.

I wanted a bench that treats enchantments as work you pay for in materials — not a second enchanting table, and not an anvil with extra steps. Three jobs, one at a time: Extract, Transcribe, and Evoca. The room around the bench decides what it is allowed to do. Reagents stay the price of every click. Evoca is where enchantments are born; Extract and Transcribe still work on ones that already exist.

How it works

Craft an Enchantment Workbench and place it. Open it for a vanilla-style screen: work on the left, your inventory on the right.

Three tabs, one job at a time. Evoca is the azure tab so it does not look like the other two. Tick the enchantments you want in the list (same idea as the enchanting table). A furnace-style arrow runs for about a second, then the job completes. Close the screen, change the selection, or pull the materials out mid-arrow and it cancels.

A ? on the work panel opens a short in-game guide (five pages). The bench is not a chest: when you close it, everything inside goes back to you.

Extract

Item or enchanted book on the left, empty books on the right. Tick what to pull off; the rest stays where it is.

How many empty books you put in decides the packing:

• one book, several ticks → everything you ticked lands on that book;
• as many books as ticks → one enchantment per book;
• in between → a fair split, leftovers on the first books.

Unused extra books stay put. No empty books means no extraction. Produced enchanted books go into your inventory.

Transcribe

Enchanted books on the left (up to three), destination on the right: an empty book, an enchanted book, or an item.

By default, ticked enchantments move: they leave the first source book that has them — one copy — and go to the destination. Unticked ones stay.

• Empty book → a new enchanted book in your inventory.
• Enchanted book → added or raised on that book.
• Item → applied onto the item (stricter cost).

Rows that cannot go on the destination stay greyed out, with a reason: not supported on that item, incompatible with something already there, or already present at the same level or higher.

On the same tab, two checkboxes (off by default). They cannot both be on:

• Copy — same destination rules, but the source books keep the enchantments. Costs one gold ingot per click on top of the usual reagents. No candles required.
• Fuse — two matching copies combine one level, like the anvil: II + II becomes III. One jump only, no cascade — Knockback II does not become III. Each jump costs one gold ingot, and the room must have lit candles on all four corners or the checkbox stays off. Rain putting them out mid-arrow cancels the job — not a bug.

Evoca

Empty book on the right, reagents in the usual slots. Two or three offers appear before you click — one enchantment each. Pay the selected offer and you get one enchanted book in your inventory. XP does not move.

Your experience levels are a ceiling, not a cost: they cap the tier you can evoke and how many offers you see. The room still has the last word (bookshelves for tier, soul lantern for treasure and curses). Candles do not affect Evoca. Reagents both weight the roll and pay the selected offer. Creative mode opens the player cap (three offers, up to tier V) and still pays materials.

Then Transcribe that book onto an item if you want. Evoca does not enchant tools directly, and it does not stack several enchantments on the same book.

The room

The room opens work. It does not discount reagents. Nothing around the bench is consumed.

Under the inventory: L n/15 S 0/1 C n/4. Hover it for the words. If a row in the list is grey, that row's tooltip says why.

Build a U, two storeys high — left, front, right. The back stays open so you can walk in.

Each arm of the U is five blocks wide. Do not fill all five. The two ends of every arm are corners: leave them empty. Those four corners are for a pillar and a lit candle. If you put a bookshelf on a corner, Fuse has nowhere to go.

The three blocks in the middle of the left wall, the front wall, and the right wall are bookshelves. Do that on two layers (bench height and one block up):

• 6 left (3 + 3)
• 6 front (3 + 3)
• 6 right (3 + 3)

That is 18 shelves. The game caps at 15 (tier V); the extra three are spare so losing one still sits at max. A single layer (9 shelves) is a small study: tier III. The second layer is what reaches IV and V.

Air (or carpets) in the gap between the bench and the shelves. A solid block in that gap kills the outer shelf, same as vanilla. Wool and moss carpets count for this bench; a vanilla enchanting table treats them as blocked.

L / S / C

• L — those bookshelves. Power 0–15 = the highest tier this bench can touch.
• S — soul lantern. Exactly one vanilla minecraft:soul_lantern, standing or hanging, two blocks above the bench (over the open book). Not in the book. Not at Y+1. Iron lanterns, soul torches, soul campfires, and rechargeable modded lanterns do not count. Opens treasure and curses.
• C — the four corners. At least one lit candle on each corner (on the pillar, at Y, Y+1 or Y+2). Opens Fuse on Transcribe only. Copy does not use candles. Evoca does not use candles.

A bare bench still does common tier I (Sharpness, Efficiency, Protection). Fortune, Mending, curses, and combining levels need the room.

Mending = L 15 and the lantern. A tier-I curse in a hole = lantern only. Fuse on two Silk Touch IIs = L 11+ and four lit corners (plus a gold ingot). Evoca uses L and S the same way; your XP levels are an extra ceiling, not a cost. Copy needs gold, not candles.

If a requirement disappears mid-arrow (candle out, shelf broken, lantern taken), the job cancels, same as missing reagents.

Top-down (same U, three heights)

Y = 0 — bench and lower shelves. C is a corner pillar, not a bookshelf.

C  .  .  .  C     ← corners empty (pillars)
S  .  .  .  S     ← 3 on the left, 3 on the right
S  .  T  .  S
S  .  .  .  S
C  S  S  S  C     ← 3 in front; corners empty; back is the door

Y = 1 — upper shelves. Lit candles on the four corner pillars (c).

c  .  .  .  c
S  .  .  .  S
S  .  .  .  S
S  .  .  .  S
c  S  S  S  c

Y = 2 — lantern only, on the bench column, over the open book.

.  .  .  .  .
.  .  .  .  .
.  .  L  .  .
.  .  .  .  .
.  .  .  .  .

T bench · S bookshelf · L soul lantern · C corner pillar (any block) · c lit candle · . air (carpets OK in the gap)

With the GUI closed, idle particles echo the same three: glyphs from the shelves, soul wisps on the book if S is present, sparks from the corners only at C 4/4.

Materials

Every click has a material cost. Creative mode still pays it.

Slots, in order: lapis lazuli, amethyst shard, emerald, diamond, obsidian, gold ingot (gold for Copy, for Fuse jumps, and to weight treasure on Evoca).

Costs scale with the enchantment's tier and the job: extracting is cheaper than transcribing onto a book; applying onto an item is dearer than transcribing onto a book; Evoca sits with Transcribe-on-a-book. Copy and Fuse each add a gold ingot on top of that. Treasure adds a surcharge. Curses pay extra obsidian when extracted, not when evoked. Evoca needs at least one lapis in the bid or there are no offers.

A datapack can override any enchantment's profile without a mod update.

What it doesn't touch

• Vanilla enchanting table and anvil stay as they are.
• No XP is spent or refunded.
• The room never cheapens reagents.
• The bench does not store items between uses.

Crafting

ALA
BTB
ENE

• A = Amethyst Block
• L = Lectern
• B = Lapis Block
• T = Enchanting Table
• E = Emerald
• N = Anvil

Compatibility

• Minecraft: 1.21.1
• Mod loader: NeoForge
• Client & Server
• Multiplayer supported
• Standalone — no other mod required
• Enchantment costs are datapack-overridable
• JEI (optional): looking up the bench or an enchanted book shows Extract and Transcribe material costs. Copy and Fuse are a note on Transcribe, not their own tabs. The bench info mentions Evoca; Evoca does not have its own JEI category yet.

Enchantment Workbench by Worlds From Blocks Studio