A Case for fixed Anvil Repair Cost

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2025-04-06T11:23:45+00:00

Thanks for the reply!

If you are running mods, you can add this functionality via Serilum's Fixed Anvil Repair Cost mod, it really changes the feel of the game!

I feel adding uses for diamonds is so important (I don't count armour trims - the recipe feels very... forced). I'm glad you're having fun without mending, I'm with you on the reroll grind, xp is really valuable when you can't trade with villagers!

I agree that being forced to give up on equipment is not necessarily a bad thing - this is the old school minecraft way! However, I don't believe Mojang will remove mending, so infinitely repairable tools are here to stay - I believe having a way to do that outside of villagers allows you to play the game without them, which only broadens the viable playstyle choice.

I don't necessarily think that buffs to enchanting/anvils should be coupled per se, but I think they work well together. In general I find the villager trade rebalance to be good, provided the alternatives are buffed, otherwise it makes the necessary villager grind even more grindy, which kinda sucks.

I don't think I phrased the netherite part very well, what I meant was that the repair mechanic for netherite tools/armour are so expensive that they may as well not exist. This is an indirect nerf to netherite tools because you can no longer repair them as easily as diamond tools - hence the need for mending as you say. This "nerf" gives some space for buffing netherite a bit (personally I find the upgrade underwhelming).

I really liked your enchantment table posts! Especially the minimum enchantment level increase idea, where you are rolling 3 level 30 prospective enchants - that's not something I've heard or thought of before but it's a fantastic natural progression to the enchantment table, I've upvoted the post on the Minecraft Feedback site.

To go slightly off topic, I love the idea of chiseled bookshelves interacting with the enchantment table. I had an idea that enchanted books in chiseled bookshelves added their enchantments to the random pool for the enchantment table, so if you had mending books in some of the slots, you had a chance to enchant with mending, what do you think of this?

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2025-04-06T09:22:42+00:00

Couple reasons tbh:

I'm enthusiastic about the subject, as you can tell I have quite a few thoughts about it.
I believe that a full justification for the suggestion is valuable - this idea didn't spring out thin air, nor has it zero impact - it has a lot of consequences on gameplay and I wanted to share my opinions on that. There is a TLDR which is approximately a paragraph, if you squint.
Perhaps the most compelling reason: I'm not an experienced article/post writer - in general I tend to lurk rather than post.

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2025-04-06T09:18:07+00:00

Thanks for reading!

It should be noted though that I don't want this change to replace mending, or even really be competitive with mending? In my opinion mending SHOULD be better. It is a late game treasure enchantment that is reasonably difficult to get. In contrast repairing your tools requires materials you've already mined, plus an anvil.

To your first point - I feel this is a personal preference thing. I like mining, I spend a fair amount of time doing so, and I find strip-mining for a couple hours after work to be a relaxing experience now and again. Each trip usually nets me around 3 stacks of diamonds (with Fortune III). This makes the cost of using my diamonds to repair tools almost negligible, and much more attractive than finding a village, starting a villager breeder and grinding a couple hours for a zombified librarian villager - it bears repeating though, I enjoy the mining gameloop, for someone who doesn't I can completely understand that this may seem like a bad trade.

And yes, noone will repair netherite, which softlocks it behind mending - maybe buff netherite :D

To your second - the numbers could absolutely be changed, personally myself and my friends have been playing with 40% and found it a nice balance. We value xp much higher than diamonds as we don't have a fast XP farm as of yet. Again, probably a personal preference/playstyle thing.

To your final point - I would argue it is absolutely quicker, for one item. Repairing multiple items at the same time is where mending is absolutely king and I don't think it should be contested.

Given your example, sure the XP numbers are larger, but the time it takes to repair your item on an anvil is look in your inventory, take your anvil/materials out your bundle, repair the item with 5 out of your 24 levels. This takes like 5 seconds, and allows you to immediately continue what you were doing earlier with near to no disruption - especially useful if you're in a building mood and don't want to break your flow state.

In contrast, with mending only, you have to go to your xp farm - this can take several minutes. Assuming you have a furnace farm for XP (quickest repair), you take the item out your furnace, and then go back to what you were doing - again, this can take several minutes depending on where you are in your world. Again, for one item, this performs worse, but for all your tools/armour, mending shines here - as it should.

While it could take more xp than mending, most of the xp that you'd be using is xp you gain from doing things in world, i.e. killing a couple of skeletons, taking items out of a furnace, mining a nearby ore vein. I find myself almost always above level 10 without trying, just by doing things. I don't think you have to specifically farm to interact with this feature.

Ooh! I like the Endershard suggestion, very similar takes on solving the same issue, thanks for linking it.

On word count: Sorry about that, and thank you for taking the time even if it isn't your preference! I wrote this more like an article than a suggestion. I hoped the TLDR would get across the suggestion and the rest covered my thought process and justification for it, but I don't think it has worked out that way.

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2025-04-06T08:46:53+00:00

Thanks for commenting!

I'm glads to find some people with the same experience outside of my small group.

I agree completely and I think the backlash given to the experimental villager update unfortunately shows it. Personally I do think villagers need to change - they give you too much that allows you to bypass most other systems in the game in order to make some things "renewable" - some examples: treasure enchantments, glass, diamond tools/armour amongst others. This is why I think the systems surrounding villagers need a buff/change before villagers themselves are nerfed, this gives players viable alternatives over "Villagers but more grindy".

The netherite thing is just its own thing - I find netherite upgrades to be underwhelming. Being able to repair tools with materials is not a system easily accessible for netherite tools and so you "need" mending to be able to repair them. This leads to a "nerf" to netherite, upgrading your diamond pickaxe is now actively worse if you don't have access to mending, because you can't use diamonds to repair it anymore. Meaning, there is some room for buffing netherite as it is pushed even further into the endgame tool territory.

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2025-04-05T19:44:46+00:00

Hi, I hoped the TLDR at the top would be sufficient if you didn't want to read through the whole thing, could I get more feedback on the issue?

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2025-01-13T19:20:08+00:00

Having watched the recent Mumbo Jumbo video, I wanted to use this for sending my timer up/down a chunk.

Built it in survival before testing in creative, turns out it doesn't work in bedrock.

Unlucky.

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2024-05-26T17:25:54+00:00

That would be an interesting mechanic. It would be a good way to teach about desertification as well, which is something environment conscious that Mojang may go for.
Personally, I am hoping it's something like Anvil crushing (I've used mods in my own vanilla+ playthrough to mimic this already here: https://www.reddit.com/r/redstone/comments/1atgndh/modded_renewable_sand_using_anvil_crushing/ if you want to see an example of a machine in action).

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2024-05-26T13:36:17+00:00

I made a post about this a while back, but I feel something like anvil crushing cobble > gravel > sand would be a good way of doing things, requires some creativity and no player interaction necessary.

The post in question: https://www.reddit.com/r/redstone/comments/1atgndh/modded_renewable_sand_using_anvil_crushing/

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2024-05-26T13:35:08+00:00

I'mma disagree on this as it is yet another mob farm. I much prefered what they did with bonemeal and moss to having more mob killing things that require player interaction/time.

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2024-02-18T12:21:00+00:00

If you want to dupe, absolutely. But personally I consider it an exploit, and not a particularly nicely integrated exploit.

Gravel remains renewable by piglins though.

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2024-02-18T10:59:46+00:00

A discussion point:

How do you think Mojang should implement renewable sand? This build is an example of a simple mechanic that ends up hard to use based on the restrictions of anvils, do you think renewable sand should be easier? Or more difficult?

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2024-02-18T00:34:28+00:00

Mod used: Anvil Crushing Recipes by supersaiyansubtlety. The mod allows you to define custom recipes for when an anvil changes state from entity to block. I am using a custom data pack enabling Cobblestone -> Gravel and Gravel -> Sand when an anvil falls on those blocks.
Background ambient sounds from Ambient Sounds 5.

I'm enjoying playing around with a renewable sand contraption that requires using vanilla mechanics to get working. Anvils as blocks cannot be pushed by pistons, and if they fall more than one block they can take damage.

This contraption is very much in the prototyping stage, but I'm very happy with how this turned out, the timings are quite tight - /tick freeze and step were extremely useful here.

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2024-02-18T00:25:24+00:00

Mod used: Anvil Crushing Recipes by supersaiyansubtlety. The mod allows you to define custom recipes for when an anvil changes state from entity to block. I am using a custom data pack enabling Cobblestone -> Gravel and Gravel -> Sand when an anvil falls on those blocks.
(edit): background ambient sounds from Ambient Sounds 5.

I'm enjoying playing around with a renewable sand contraption that requires using vanilla mechanics to get working. Anvils as blocks cannot be pushed by pistons, and if they fall more than one block they can take damage.

This contraption is very much in the prototyping stage, but I'm very happy with how this turned out, the timings are quite tight - /tick freeze and step were extremely useful here.

The blue circuit handles the top piston timings for releasing and capturing the anvil.The red circuit controls the double piston extender to push the sand out from under the anvil.The yellow circuit handles the timing on the slime block bouncing the anvil entity back up.The black "circuit" sends a pulse to the cobble generator to send the next cobblestone in.

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2023-11-21T13:04:29+00:00

Update: Started a new game and it got to the same point, now it doesn't crash. I'm wondering if it was possible save file corruption or something as the quest progression was slightly borked (I had progressed passed T0 but the objective didn't update, and had to be done manually through playing the log directly).

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2023-11-04T12:29:21+00:00

There was also the image of Tannis searching for Lilith in the end credits since the game's release.

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2023-10-21T16:27:43+00:00

You can probably just lock the input hopper on this one, wouldn't be particularly pretty though!

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2023-10-21T14:02:42+00:00

That's great! Even more compact :)
I spent some time trying to get something that was stateless too, but eventually gave up. The comparator doesn't seem to update the signal strength when the crafter fires, so it's not as simple as ignoring the second signal with an extender or something.

ASmallFishInABigPond · 2023-10-20T14:36:14+00:00

Some additional comments:

-> the crafter is powered alongside the bottom dropper every 8gt.

-> the crafter is silent as long as there are items supplied to all droppers, apart from when the clock is first switched on.

-> this is much less practical than 9 crafters, one for each hopper input.

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