If an item is too powerful to repair, am I screwed?

I have a bow that has Power IV, Flame II, Punch II, and Infinity I, and also it's renamed. According to the wiki, that has a base value of 38. Since the max level is 39, that would mean practically anything I want to do is above the max. Is there any way to repair it?

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5 Answers

You can repair the bow without using an anvil, but you'd lose the enchantments. I'm afraid that without mods you won't be able to repair your bow, use it wisely :-(

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As fredley stated, you cannot repair it in game. But since you asked for ANY way to repair it, you could use NBTExplorer to set the damage of your bow to 0.

Simple open the level.dat file inside the folder of your world with NBTExplorer and klick Search->Find. Tick the two checkboxes and search for name:"id" and value:"261".

This will quickly show your bow, now you just have double-click "Damage" and enter 0.

That's it, your bow is saved ;) ( btw: that's an awesome bow! )

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As of 1.9, you can get the Mending enchantment, which repairs it automatically while getting experience. Be careful though, this is a treasure enchantment, so you may only get it only through fishing, buying from villagers, or from chests in Generated Structures.

If you are willing to cheat, (And it's on single player) just click open to LAN and turn on cheats, then do "/gamemode 1" then you can repair it for free.

I have not tested this yet, just in Idea stage right now, but maybe if you put a regular bow in the first slot and add the enchanted bow to it, it would only have been worked one time, so I would think you would be able to work on it more. It would be as if you had combined all the books and then put it on a bow. (Just ifs though)