Minecraft Forums

The durability of tools (not weapons or armour) should be based on how long they are used and not how many blocks they destroy. This would make shovels more useful and not die as fast.
Example to clarify (all numbers taken from the wiki):
A diamond pick takes 15 seconds to dig through obsidian and about .5 seconds to dig through rock. Currently, the pick can be used to dig through 1025 blocks of obsidian or 1025 blocks of stone. If durability is based on time and diamond pick has, for example, 10 minutes (600 seconds) of durability then it can dig through 40 blocks of obsidian or 1200 blocks of stone. Just to be clear, the time only ticks down when you are using the tool.
One thing to look out for when balancing though: usage time should not be exponential like uses on current equipment because the time it takes also scales.
This makes more sense and is more balanced and makes shovels viable beyond planned digging tasks.
Please review, comment, critique etc...
Thanks.

It's much easier to simply make shovels last more uses, proportional to the average ratio of the time necessary to use it in comparison to the pickaxe and axe.

Quote from MrTorus »

It's much easier to simply make shovels last more uses, proportional to the average ratio of the time necessary to use it in comparison to the pickaxe and axe.

But then you still have the problem of being able to mine the same amount of obsidian as stone. This could be changed by making obsidian take up more uses but I really don't think that this idea would be hard to implement at all.

as for shovels, they only use 1 wood/stone/iron/diamond, so it makes sense that it doesn't last as long.

The huge downside to this is that you'd be in the middle of mining a block, and then the tool's durability suddenly runs out and the block is unscathed.

Err... Shovels already use two durability points with improper use. You could still just tweak that to make it fair.

Wouldn't be a very good idea.

You can quite literally use up the entirety of a diamond pick on two blocks of gravel without ever breaking a block.

This would require that Blocks also remember how damaged they are in order for it to work in any way.

Quote from sabata2 »

Wouldn't be a very good idea.

You can quite literally use up the entirety of a diamond pick on two blocks of gravel without ever breaking a block.

This would require that Blocks also remember how damaged they are in order for it to work in any way.

Damage to the item would only register if the block is destroyed. Thinking about it though, you could just assign values to block of how much damage they do to an item and base it off of the time it takes to mine it.

Also, even though shovels take only one material to make, it still doesn't make sense that your shovel will break after 5 minutes of shoveling sand. When was the last time you had a shovel break on you at the beach when making sand castles? Pickaxes take way more wear and tear.