Books Can Enchant Anything

Books Can Enchant Anything

A Minecraft data pack that lets any enchantment be applied to any item via enchanted book and anvil (or the /enchant command). Enchanting tables retain their vanilla behavior.

This means you can finally place Unbreaking on a flint and steel, Fire Aspect on a shovel, or Aqua Affinity on a mob head. Or more useful combinations, of course.

How it works

Works by overriding every vanilla enchantment’s supported_items attribute to a tag that contains every item in the game.

• data/bcea/tags/item/all.json: an item tag listing every item ID in the game (except air).
• data/minecraft/enchantment/*.json: a full copy of each vanilla enchantment definition with only the supported_items field replaced with #bcea:all. Everything else (effects, costs, weights, slots, primary_items) is untouched, so enchanting-table behavior is unchanged, only anvil//enchant restrictions are lifted.

Installation

Drop this folder into your world’s datapacks/ directory (or a resource-pack-style
zip of it), then run /reload or restart the world.

[!NOTE]

The items and enchantments in this pack are compiled directly from the vanilla client jar. Therefore, this pack does not work out-of-the-box with modded clients that introduce new items/blocks.

The next section explains how to update this pack for your desired version of Minecraft. In the future, perhaps I will automate this as a CI/CD workflow so that all of the recent Minecraft versions are supported with a pre-compiled release.

Updating for a new Minecraft version

The list of items and enchantments comes directly from a vanilla (or modded) client jar. Two scripts are included to regenerate this pack’s contents so it can be easily updated for a new game version.

The scripts require Python 3 and no additional dependencies. Run these commands from the root of this pack’s folder, passing the path to a vanilla client jar as an argument:

python3 scripts/update_item_tag.py /path/to/client.jar
python3 scripts/update_enchantments.py /path/to/client.jar
# Optionally create a zip of the pack:
zip -r books-can-enchant-anything_VERSION.zip data pack.mcmeta pack.png

update_item_tag.py rebuilds data/bcea/tags/item/all.json from the jar’s assets/minecraft/items/*.json item model list (every real item has one; air is excluded on purpose).

update_enchantments.py rebuilds data/minecraft/enchantment/*.json by copying each enchantment straight from the jar, then only modifying supported_items (changed to #bcea:all) and primary_items (added, set to the enchantment’s original vanilla supported_items, if the jar’s copy doesn’t already have one). This way enchanting tables still only show the vanilla list of available enchants, while anvil//enchant becomes fully permissive. It also warns about any enchantment .json present in the pack but missing from the jar, in case an enchantment was removed upstream.