Can You Remove Cursed Enchantments In Minecraft? Curse of Binding & Vanishing

Curses are designed to be inconvenient roadblocks in the way of progress. Minecraft isn’t a cruel game to play, but sometimes it can have some blockades that come up to make the game just a tad more difficult.

A Curse of Vanishing makes it so that any item dropped when the player dies vanishes into thin air, instead of dropping like normal to be obtained later. Curses like the Curse of Binding keeps a piece of armor on a player no matter what, which can be inconvenient for items like carved pumpkins. Below we’ll explain what you can do about curses in Minecraft if you happen to find yourself in a predicament during a Survival run.

Related: 12 Best Minecraft Survival Maps

Can Cursed Enchantments Be Removed?

Unfortunately for hardcore players in Minecraft, Mojang really wanted Curses to be as problem-causing as possible. While you can use a Grindstone to remove regular old Enchantments from items, you cannot use one to remove Cursed Enchantments from items. The only way to remove these inconvenient enchantments is to either use console commands or activate Creative Mode to have more inventory freedom. While there’s no way to remove a curse, there are ways to react to a curse that may help salvage your run.

If you don’t mind using console commands to salvage your Minecraft run, you can use the following code to remove an item with Curse of Binding on your character. In our example, we use the carved pumpkin as a placeholder, but you can replace this with any item that you have stuck to your character: /clear <player_name> minecraft:carved_pumpkin{Enchantments:[{id:”minecraft:binding_curse”}]}

While removing a cursed piece of armor may be impossible in the base game, if it’s worth it to save your run, console commands and Creative mode can serve as a hearty last resort.

How To React To a Curse of Binding

Depending on what item is cursed, a Curse of Binding can either be run ending or just be inconvenient to deal with. If you’re doing a Hardcore run in Minecraft, getting rid of the bound object is impossible without ruining your run as it stands. If you have a carved pumpkin bound to your head, it may not be worth it to continue the run at all, as the vision impairment alone could cost you the run later down the line.

If you’re simply playing Survival mode though, a Curse of Binding is relatively simple to fix. All you need to do is wear down the item that’s stuck to you by damaging it enough or simply just throw yourself off the nearest cliff. Doing either of these things will remove the bound item from you, freeing you of your curse. This is why it’s a good idea to make sure to look at any item before you equip it after looting some chests since any curse can ruin a run.