Minecraft Forums

I kept checking Painterly's website in hopes that he had something to tell about the 1.9 update.

I hope the site is just down because there's updates being done, but... Otherwise, it seems like the end of an age.

This saddens me.

Crops already do cause a block update, according to the wiki.

You might be confusing your issue with the fact that crops do not grow if their chunk is unloaded.

Greetings! I don't visit the Minecraft Forums very much anymore, but I was poking around at enchanting and repair costs earlier (wondering why in the world the level requirement was so high, repairing a bow that I had enchanted) and I was quite confused by how the mechanics work.

Remember back when enchanting first came out, and the lament of almost every player was that they couldn't combine enchantments, or preserve their beautifully-crafted Sharpness IV diamond sword? We were all so excited when the anvil was announced, because it could do just that! It even had the added helping of naming your weapons, so I could then make a really kick-butt sword and name it Andromeda, because it needed an equally epic name.

...But, as it turns out, the restrictions in the anvil's functions make it a very silly self-defeating mechanism. This is demonstrated in microcosm by how it is the only utility block that actually breaks itself over many uses. Wooden bench that summons a metal saw when crafted? Nah, you can compress raw diamonds on that baby and it isn't so much as scratched. But, a solid iron anvil? Nono, it can completely shatter after the long and tedious process of copying tiny runes from a book onto a wooden pickaxe. Why doesn't the Enchanting Table explode after a few uses, then?

Of course the progressively-damaging-anvil isn't that bad. Silly, maybe, but it isn't too big a deal and makes at least a little sense in the context that they're affected by gravity and can be dropped several meters onto any given surface. What I'm talking about, and what I hoped to demonstrate with my slightly-exaggerated example, is...

The Problem

As I mentioned, the anvil is a self-defeating mechanism. Its intended purpose (other than, clearly, its effectiveness as a weapon) was to transfer enchantments and repair enchanted equipment without losing its cool little violet glow, as the crafting-based repairing system had done. However, in Survival mode, the maximum amount of anvil-based repairs you can devote to an item is exactly six, and that's entirely disregarding any enchantments you have on an item. That stems from the combination of two mechanics:

• "Prior Work" penalty
• Level cap for anvil work

While I'm not fond of either of them, personally (Prior Work is exponential and becomes impractical even after the sixth or seventh use; level cap is, in my opinion, a smidge too low), they work terribly together, resulting in that six-use maximum. Even something so small as renaming the item contributes to this, though thankfully it no longer counts as "Prior Work" in the upcoming 1.9 update.

Yes, I understand the argument that "tools are meant to, eventually, break" and that's how it was before anvils were around. But that draws back to the initial reason why anvils were added- to preserve enchanted gear. It seems silly to, instead, delay the inevitable. If that's what they were after, why not buff Unbreaking so that it can have more than three tiers? The Mending enchantment being added in 1.9 allows infinite durability, so it's not as though that exact feature was something Mojang was trying to avoid.

The other argument of "this is to avoid tools being gradually built into super-OP monster items with full [enchant]-V stuff" is a viable one, sure, but the enchantment tier levels already thwart this, somewhat. You cannot legitimately obtain a Sharpness/Knockback X diamond sword named Buttmunch. With Sharpness receiving a nerf (alongside the dps of melee combat in general) in 1.9, I see no reason to further limit the buffs available to tools.

Minecraft gives off a very "this is an infinite world and you can do infinite things, kinda" feel. The limitations here, then, seem rather out of place. That being said, I propose...

The Solution(s)

There are a couple different ways that I thought of on my own that can be done to tweak the system and, hopefully, remain balanced in gameplay. These include:

• Remove both Prior Work penalty and level cap. This will reduce repair costs to a static value based on the items and enchantments involved. The levels that any given tool/enchant would contribute to this total would all be raised significantly, so that the player would have to go through a good deal more effort to repair their favorite sword.
• Remove only the Prior Work penalty. This would get rid of the exponentially-increasing level costs, making infinite item repairs possible. However, with the level cap still in place, this would prevent players from stacking too many enchantments on a weapon.
• Remove only the level cap. This would allow as many item repairs as the game engine can withstand, though the required levels would be so unthinkably insane that few mortal souls would bear reaching it. Removing the "+1" from the Prior Work equation (cost=2n+1) could reduce that.
• Introduce a method of removing "charges" of the Prior Work penalty. While roundabout and potentially complicated, this could be a very balanced method. You could, for example, add a function to a beacon (only a top-tier diamond one) that will drop the Prior Work penalty of an item back to zero. This method could also have an extremely high level requirement, depending on the enchantments of the item and the amount of Prior Work charges that'd have to be removed.

You are quite welcome to add ideas of your own, if you come up with any. I also thought of some independent tweaks to be used alongside any of the ones listed above:

• Notify the player if the resulting item from their anvil use will exceed the level cap. As in, before you take a newly-repaired Sharpness V, Unbreaking III, Fire Aspect II sword out of the anvil slot, it will notify you that the thing is just too awesome to be repaired because it'd take too many levels. That way, unsuspecting players don't get hit by the "surprise! Your favorite sword is doomed" truck.
• Make the upcoming "Mending" enchantment hideously expensive to work with. Since that enchantment effectively gives you unlimited durability unless you're in the business of falling off cliffs, we'll need an incentive to use Unbreaking instead, sometimes. Alternatively, you can simply disallow Mending to be transferred to diamond gear, or gear with max-level enchantments.

As with the other section, feel free to add to that if you have ideas. I am entirely aware that I can't think of everything on my own!

So, yeah. Discuss?

Minor update: made synopsis easier to read. I might revisit to try and fix the spoiler tags in the OP sometime later.

EDIT: actually I just revisited it and wow holy crap what happened to that formatting

I'll try to fix that ASAP.

Oh, wow! I dare say this is on par with ye olde Minefic stuff, back when the Literature subsection didn't exist and you had to be really fantastic to be noticed among the banner ads.

My criticisms are few and far between. First is that you seem to be summarizing a story rather than telling one- it reads out very quickly and events happen at a quick pace. It's not wrong by any means, but it tends to make it hard for readers to imagine the details as you write them, and it doesn't leave as many open spaces for describing, in detail, settings or important events. Slow your pace down a little bit and focus on sensory details- it'll make the end product a lot longer, but there's no such thing as a story that is too long. If you need help with the sensory details, just try to write down what a setting is like from as many of the five senses as you possibly can, with sight being the last one.

Secondly, be careful with your word choice. Right off the bat, there's the problem of censoring yourself in the first paragraph. While I see why you chose to do what you did, having to replace a word with asterisks almost entirely breaks immersion. If you must, try to be "politically correct" and soften the language to a measure that would be acceptable without censorship. Once again, this could mean making it longer, but a story is only ever one of two lengths: the length it needs to be, and the length that needs to be changed.

That's really it, though. As far as plot is concerned, you've done a great job obtaining the interest of readers. Well done!

Quote from Blazevoir

So... are the Breezies German, or was that another language, if any actual one?

Quote from Bbqpizza

So...someone tell me where some of the MLP thread-ers went. Did they leave?

Quote from SeaWry

To unlock a box for 6 keys. Better be a golden wrench in there.

Quote from SeaWry

In that box is a 1000 year old demon sealed by 6 keys, 6 elements and 6 ponies. (Few will know where I draw 1000Yr demon from.)

Or a magical artifact that not even the combined elements compare to.

Then again could just be another box.

Mini edited.