I disagree with being mutually exclusive with Fortune; one of the reasons I added a "smelting" (as I call it) enchantment was to enable using Fortune on iron and gold since they drop ingots instead of themselves*, and being a true treasure enchantment that can only be found in loot chests means you can't easily obtain it (on average, I've found one book per 65 hours of caving, or per 37 dungeons found, even as it is more common than other enchantments. I really doubt the average player is going to spend even 1/10 of that time caving in all their time playing, or at least in one world, no matter the incentives. Maybe they can find dungeons faster if they only search fro them but they are only half as densely concentrated since 1.7, not sure if 1.18 changed their density).
*I did also add raw iron and gold which drop when mined with a "hammer" tool but I nerfed Fortune so it is only half as effective (+60% instead of +120% drops with Fortune III) to help balance them out and make Smelting the desired enchantment (I'd added Smelting first, then raw ores when Mojang added it). From actually using it in gameplay the benefit of not having to smelt ores in a furnace, and getting extra XP as well (similar to mining other ores vs smelting them) was not that great when considering how much coal I collect (many times what I use to smelt things) and the time spent on (un)loading furnaces.
A more interesting way Smelting is balanced in TMCW is that an amethyst (equivalent to netherite in status) pickaxe with Smelting and Fortune III costs too much to put Mending on it; you have to use rubies to reduce the prior work penalty after every 3 repairs, and if you add Efficiency V it can only be repaired once per ruby for 49 levels (the maximum cost for amethyst items, other items are limited to 39):
When Mending is added to an item it considers the minimum repair cost after it was applied; if this cost exceeds the cost limit it will say too expensive even if the actual cost to add the enchantment wouldn't be, as a way to help prevent the player from adding Mending to an item only to find they can't repair it (this only works if Mending is the last enchantment to be added):
It is still possible to repair it for 43, 45, and 47 levels before using a ruby to reduce the penalty by 6 levels (3 workings):
Efficiency V also works but you now get only one repair before you must reduce the penalty (the cost to use a ruby is calculated differently so it won't be too expensive even if you can't repair it):
The cost to use a ruby is the number of enchantments times 3 plus the prior work penalty plus the penalty reduction (3 x 3 + 2 + 2); the enchantment cost multiplier is 2 for diamond and 1 for iron:
It is possible to make a Smelting, Fortune, Mending diamond pickaxe but it can only be repaired with a single diamond at a time, or a damaged sacrifice, making repairs more difficult; iron is even cheaper (the repair cost itself depends on durability) but again you sacrifice durability and speed, and none of these even had Unbreaking (you could swap it with Mending and use rubies to lower the penalty, but rubies themselves are only found in specific biomes and require additional anvil uses and XP):
The sacrifice has 600 durability missing, resulting in 1148 durability restored per repair (for comparison, one unit restores 1171 durability to an amethyst tool so diamond is more cost-effective if you can afford the time and effort to wear down tools):
(the way Mojang implemented Mending is very unbalanced since any item, no matter how heavily enchanted it is or its inherent quality, costs the same, just 0.5 XP per durability or 0.125 XP per use with Unbreaking III; even anvil repairing is only 2 levels for any item or 1 level per unit - if they had retained the old repair system and made Mending simply stop the penalty from increasing you'd have to make trade-offs as shown above, instead of making uber-items with every possible enchantment, at least if you wanted to be able to repair them)
I disagree with being mutually exclusive with Fortune; one of the reasons I added a "smelting" (as I call it) enchantment was to enable using Fortune on iron and gold since they drop ingots instead of themselves*, and being a true treasure enchantment that can only be found in loot chests means you can't easily obtain it (on average, I've found one book per 65 hours of caving, or per 37 dungeons found, even as it is more common than other enchantments. I really doubt the average player is going to spend even 1/10 of that time caving in all their time playing, or at least in one world, no matter the incentives. Maybe they can find dungeons faster if they only search fro them but they are only half as densely concentrated since 1.7, not sure if 1.18 changed their density).
*I did also add raw iron and gold which drop when mined with a "hammer" tool but I nerfed Fortune so it is only half as effective (+60% instead of +120% drops with Fortune III) to help balance them out and make Smelting the desired enchantment (I'd added Smelting first, then raw ores when Mojang added it). From actually using it in gameplay the benefit of not having to smelt ores in a furnace, and getting extra XP as well (similar to mining other ores vs smelting them) was not that great when considering how much coal I collect (many times what I use to smelt things) and the time spent on (un)loading furnaces.
A more interesting way Smelting is balanced in TMCW is that an amethyst (equivalent to netherite in status) pickaxe with Smelting and Fortune III costs too much to put Mending on it; you have to use rubies to reduce the prior work penalty after every 3 repairs, and if you add Efficiency V it can only be repaired once per ruby for 49 levels (the maximum cost for amethyst items, other items are limited to 39):
When Mending is added to an item it considers the minimum repair cost after it was applied; if this cost exceeds the cost limit it will say too expensive even if the actual cost to add the enchantment wouldn't be, as a way to help prevent the player from adding Mending to an item only to find they can't repair it (this only works if Mending is the last enchantment to be added):
It is still possible to repair it for 43, 45, and 47 levels before using a ruby to reduce the penalty by 6 levels (3 workings):
Efficiency V also works but you now get only one repair before you must reduce the penalty (the cost to use a ruby is calculated differently so it won't be too expensive even if you can't repair it):
The cost to use a ruby is the number of enchantments times 3 plus the prior work penalty plus the penalty reduction (3 x 3 + 2 + 2); the enchantment cost multiplier is 2 for diamond and 1 for iron:
It is possible to make a Smelting, Fortune, Mending diamond pickaxe but it can only be repaired with a single diamond at a time, or a damaged sacrifice, making repairs more difficult; iron is even cheaper (the repair cost itself depends on durability) but again you sacrifice durability and speed, and none of these even had Unbreaking (you could swap it with Mending and use rubies to lower the penalty, but rubies themselves are only found in specific biomes and require additional anvil uses and XP):
The sacrifice has 600 durability missing, resulting in 1148 durability restored per repair (for comparison, one unit restores 1171 durability to an amethyst tool so diamond is more cost-effective if you can afford the time and effort to wear down tools):
(the way Mojang implemented Mending is very unbalanced since any item, no matter how heavily enchanted it is or its inherent quality, costs the same, just 0.5 XP per durability or 0.125 XP per use with Unbreaking III; even anvil repairing is only 2 levels for any item or 1 level per unit - if they had retained the old repair system and made Mending simply stop the penalty from increasing you'd have to make trade-offs as shown above, instead of making uber-items with every possible enchantment, at least if you wanted to be able to repair them)
Even if gear were limited to only 4 enchantments each for indefinite repairs to be possible I would still be okay with it because it would still be possible to craft useful equipment with this, equipment which can be practically used for large scale projects such as mansions, castles, cities, floating islands and what have you.
You offered a decent compromise for negating prior work penalty with the rubies suggestion, which as you said would only be found in certain biomes.
Where we disagree here is limiting tool or armour repairs to one diamond at a time, how would you fully repair something if say your enchanted Pickaxe only had 10% durability remaining? having that cost more than 39XP levels to do the full repair on top of the cost of the diamond is pretty steep if you ask me.
I am not sure if allowing Smelting on the same tool as Fortune is a good idea though, Smelting is a very powerful enchantment idea that would allow players to entirely skip the process of using furnaces to process their resources for crafting, as the ingots would already be made for them.
It would be a useful enchant, don't get me wrong, but I don't much like the idea of making furnaces less useful.
Forcing players to choose either Fortune or Smelting would at least guarantee that furnaces remain a useful block for things
other than making charcoal, processing mineral blocks into decoration ones or cooking food.
Where we disagree here is limiting tool or armour repairs to one diamond at a time, how would you fully repair something if say your enchanted Pickaxe only had 10% durability remaining? having that cost more than 39XP levels to do the full repair on top of the cost of the diamond is pretty steep if you ask me.
Simple - you repair items incrementally, as I've been doing for nearly all my gear in TMCW (amethyst gear is so expensive that even unenchanted items can only be repaired with one unit at a time, though they do restore 3/4 the durability of a full repair of a diamond item), and used to do in vanilla back when I used an Efficiency V, Fortune III, Unbreaking III diamond pickaxe for all mining while caving (each repair costs 37 levels for one diamond to restore 25% of the full durability; expensive? I've never needed XP farms, just entirely relying off of XP from mining ores and killing mobs, and not like you'd use a Fortune pickaxe on non-ore blocks if it came to that, or general building, clearing out an area, and so on - modern Minecraft players are spoiled by the low costs of using Mending enabling them to just use one "god tier" item for everything, except for maybe choosing between Silk Touch and Fortune, or Infinity and Mending (an exclusion I disagree with).
As seen here, I've mined over 2 million blocks with an amethyst pickaxe, 429 repairs at 1171 durability and 4684 uses (with Unbreaking III) per unit; based on current costs (43, 45, 47 levels per repair, then 21 levels for a ruby, averaging 2633 XP per repair) I've spent about 1.1 million XP, but that is less than half the total XP I've collected (averaging 6600 XP per play session, during which I repair it once):
Not only that, two of the 3 pickaxes I made don't have Mending; the first one had Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, Mending while the second had Efficiency V, Smelting, Unbreaking III, Smelting and the third and by far most-used pickaxe has Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, Vein Miner II (I find the ability to mine entire veins (up to 8 blocks for level II) in one go to be far more valuable than not having to smelt them; overpowered? Less than 10% of the time I spend caving is spent on mining ores even without it, and most players just couldn't care less - just look at the replies to this post, "how much mining do you do?", on a site that is orders of magnitude more active than this one (I've never been able to have any success on Reddit, no matter how impressive my achievements may be, even compared to builds like a dirt house - really (yes, a bit more than your usual dirt house, but I undoubtedly spent far more effort on caving) - which shows just how far removed from the heart of the game most players are).
Also, incremental repairs have one huge advantage - I don't need to watch the durability when it gets down to near 0 because it never does, even after delaying repairing my pickaxe (by far my most-used item) in order to repair all 3 pieces of armor it never got much below 50% durability and I caught up over the next two repairs (repairing it as soon as I had enough levels). This is also the main advantage of amethyst even if it can't be repaired as much at once as diamond (1171 durability per unit vs 1561 for a full repair, but even 50% durability left is 9372 uses remaining with Unbreaking III).
Note also that repair costs of 40+ levels are specific to my amethyst items - vanilla items cap out at 39 levels; the reason for the difference is because the much higher durability of amethyst greatly increases the cost (iron costs 2 levels for a full repair while diamond costs 17 levels, all just because it has 6 times the durability, with amethyst tripling it yet again, the per-unit repair cost is 1 for iron, 3 for diamond, and 21 for amethyst).
You also keep saying that there should be a hard limit of 4 enchantments, but why? Why not just base it on the costs of the enchantments, just like vanilla did before 1.8? Better enchantments should cost more so you can't have as many and vice-versa, same for the item's durability affecting repair costs (a gold item with 5 enchantments? Sure, since gold is very weak and limited in usefulness; a Smelting gold pickaxe is only effective on gold ore (which I changed since other materials can mine themselves) and gets only 131 uses per repair with Unbreaking III, and with Efficiency V it is no faster than other materials on most blocks due to the way the calculations work).
Also, you could possibly (not tested) put Unbreaking I and/or Efficiency I, maybe II-III, on one of the pickaxes in my previous post since Efficiency I only costs 1 level (5 for Efficiency V) and Unbreaking I likewise only costs 2 levels (6 for Unbreaking III); in other words, low-quality enchantments cost less so you can put more on, but without the full benefit of the maximum level (the same could be done for Fortune; Fortune I costs 4 levels while Fortune III costs 12). If necessary, the costs of enchantments could even be rearranged to better reflect their value; I made Mending cost 8 levels instead of 4, conversely, I halved the cost of Thorns from 8 to 4 (24 to 12 for Thorns III).
Simple - you repair items incrementally, as I've been doing for nearly all my gear in TMCW (amethyst gear is so expensive that even unenchanted items can only be repaired with one unit at a time, though they do restore 3/4 the durability of a full repair of a diamond item), and used to do in vanilla back when I used an Efficiency V, Fortune III, Unbreaking III diamond pickaxe for all mining while caving (each repair costs 37 levels for one diamond to restore 25% of the full durability; expensive? I've never needed XP farms, just entirely relying off of XP from mining ores and killing mobs, and not like you'd use a Fortune pickaxe on non-ore blocks if it came to that, or general building, clearing out an area, and so on - modern Minecraft players are spoiled by the low costs of using Mending enabling them to just use one "god tier" item for everything, except for maybe choosing between Silk Touch and Fortune, or Infinity and Mending (an exclusion I disagree with).
As seen here, I've mined over 2 million blocks with an amethyst pickaxe, 429 repairs at 1171 durability and 4684 uses (with Unbreaking III) per unit; based on current costs (43, 45, 47 levels per repair, then 21 levels for a ruby, averaging 2633 XP per repair) I've spent about 1.1 million XP, but that is less than half the total XP I've collected (averaging 6600 XP per play session, during which I repair it once):
Not only that, two of the 3 pickaxes I made don't have Mending; the first one had Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, Mending while the second had Efficiency V, Smelting, Unbreaking III, Smelting and the third and by far most-used pickaxe has Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, Vein Miner II (I find the ability to mine entire veins (up to 8 blocks for level II) in one go to be far more valuable than not having to smelt them; overpowered? Less than 10% of the time I spend caving is spent on mining ores even without it, and most players just couldn't care less - just look at the replies to this post, "how much mining do you do?", on a site that is orders of magnitude more active than this one (I've never been able to have any success on Reddit, no matter how impressive my achievements may be, even compared to builds like a dirt house - really (yes, a bit more than your usual dirt house, but I undoubtedly spent far more effort on caving) - which shows just how far removed from the heart of the game most players are).
Also, incremental repairs have one huge advantage - I don't need to watch the durability when it gets down to near 0 because it never does, even after delaying repairing my pickaxe (by far my most-used item) in order to repair all 3 pieces of armor it never got much below 50% durability and I caught up over the next two repairs (repairing it as soon as I had enough levels). This is also the main advantage of amethyst even if it can't be repaired as much at once as diamond (1171 durability per unit vs 1561 for a full repair, but even 50% durability left is 9372 uses remaining with Unbreaking III).
Note also that repair costs of 40+ levels are specific to my amethyst items - vanilla items cap out at 39 levels; the reason for the difference is because the much higher durability of amethyst greatly increases the cost (iron costs 2 levels for a full repair while diamond costs 17 levels, all just because it has 6 times the durability, with amethyst tripling it yet again, the per-unit repair cost is 1 for iron, 3 for diamond, and 21 for amethyst).
You also keep saying that there should be a hard limit of 4 enchantments, but why? Why not just base it on the costs of the enchantments, just like vanilla did before 1.8? Better enchantments should cost more so you can't have as many and vice-versa, same for the item's durability affecting repair costs (a gold item with 5 enchantments? Sure, since gold is very weak and limited in usefulness; a Smelting gold pickaxe is only effective on gold ore (which I changed since other materials can mine themselves) and gets only 131 uses per repair with Unbreaking III, and with Efficiency V it is no faster than other materials on most blocks due to the way the calculations work).
Also, you could possibly (not tested) put Unbreaking I and/or Efficiency I, maybe II-III, on one of the pickaxes in my previous post since Efficiency I only costs 1 level (5 for Efficiency V) and Unbreaking I likewise only costs 2 levels (6 for Unbreaking III); in other words, low-quality enchantments cost less so you can put more on, but without the full benefit of the maximum level (the same could be done for Fortune; Fortune I costs 4 levels while Fortune III costs 12). If necessary, the costs of enchantments could even be rearranged to better reflect their value; I made Mending cost 8 levels instead of 4, conversely, I halved the cost of Thorns from 8 to 4 (24 to 12 for Thorns III).
Going by your system in theory I could still use specific purpose pickaxes for different things such as:
General building and terrain clearance:
Efficiency 5, Unbreaking 3 and Mending.
Efficiency 5 would be useful for mining obsidian, because sometimes you encounter lava even on the surface level of the Overworld, it's rare but can happen, even underground you may wish to build a basement or an underground warehouse to store items in chests or barrels.
The enchantments needed would be Efficiency, any level, although I do not like efficiency 5 shovels as they tend to make it harder to make perfect squares of leveled terrain out of due to clearing away dirt blocks too fast, therefore it becomes too easy to demolish an adjacent block by accident.
For mining the enchantments on pickaxes would be:
Either Fortune or Silk Touch, with Unbreaking III and Mending, to keep the enchanting cost down and likewise repair cost with it.
It's just that the problem is the more of these we end up carrying around the more inventory space is used up
And the more time I have to mine to keep my tools in top shape, as with anybody else, it means build style Mnecraft players like ourselves have less time to be doing the builds we want, because we're always on the lookout for more resources to maintain our equipment. I understand there are players who wish to have the game be made more challenging, however at what point does nerfing something become too excessive or unfair? how much more time should players be expected to spend mining in order to get their dream worlds finished so they have something to show for all their efforts?
I disagree with being mutually exclusive with Fortune; one of the reasons I added a "smelting" (as I call it) enchantment was to enable using Fortune on iron and gold since they drop ingots instead of themselves*, and being a true treasure enchantment that can only be found in loot chests means you can't easily obtain it (on average, I've found one book per 65 hours of caving, or per 37 dungeons found, even as it is more common than other enchantments. I really doubt the average player is going to spend even 1/10 of that time caving in all their time playing, or at least in one world, no matter the incentives. Maybe they can find dungeons faster if they only search fro them but they are only half as densely concentrated since 1.7, not sure if 1.18 changed their density).
*I did also add raw iron and gold which drop when mined with a "hammer" tool but I nerfed Fortune so it is only half as effective (+60% instead of +120% drops with Fortune III) to help balance them out and make Smelting the desired enchantment (I'd added Smelting first, then raw ores when Mojang added it). From actually using it in gameplay the benefit of not having to smelt ores in a furnace, and getting extra XP as well (similar to mining other ores vs smelting them) was not that great when considering how much coal I collect (many times what I use to smelt things) and the time spent on (un)loading furnaces.
A pickaxe enchantment or potion that let you have 'heat' on your pickaxe so it would cause ores to drop finished ingots.
This should be a rare non-farmable item so people don't feel tempted to exploit it constantly (treasure enchantment?)
*Also it should be mutually exclusive from silk touch, as it won't work otherwise*.
I disagree with being mutually exclusive with Fortune; one of the reasons I added a "smelting" (as I call it) enchantment was to enable using Fortune on iron and gold since they drop ingots instead of themselves*, and being a true treasure enchantment that can only be found in loot chests means you can't easily obtain it (on average, I've found one book per 65 hours of caving, or per 37 dungeons found, even as it is more common than other enchantments. I really doubt the average player is going to spend even 1/10 of that time caving in all their time playing, or at least in one world, no matter the incentives. Maybe they can find dungeons faster if they only search fro them but they are only half as densely concentrated since 1.7, not sure if 1.18 changed their density).
*I did also add raw iron and gold which drop when mined with a "hammer" tool but I nerfed Fortune so it is only half as effective (+60% instead of +120% drops with Fortune III) to help balance them out and make Smelting the desired enchantment (I'd added Smelting first, then raw ores when Mojang added it). From actually using it in gameplay the benefit of not having to smelt ores in a furnace, and getting extra XP as well (similar to mining other ores vs smelting them) was not that great when considering how much coal I collect (many times what I use to smelt things) and the time spent on (un)loading furnaces.
A more interesting way Smelting is balanced in TMCW is that an amethyst (equivalent to netherite in status) pickaxe with Smelting and Fortune III costs too much to put Mending on it; you have to use rubies to reduce the prior work penalty after every 3 repairs, and if you add Efficiency V it can only be repaired once per ruby for 49 levels (the maximum cost for amethyst items, other items are limited to 39):
When Mending is added to an item it considers the minimum repair cost after it was applied; if this cost exceeds the cost limit it will say too expensive even if the actual cost to add the enchantment wouldn't be, as a way to help prevent the player from adding Mending to an item only to find they can't repair it (this only works if Mending is the last enchantment to be added):
It is still possible to repair it for 43, 45, and 47 levels before using a ruby to reduce the penalty by 6 levels (3 workings):
Efficiency V also works but you now get only one repair before you must reduce the penalty (the cost to use a ruby is calculated differently so it won't be too expensive even if you can't repair it):
The cost to use a ruby is the number of enchantments times 3 plus the prior work penalty plus the penalty reduction (3 x 3 + 2 + 2); the enchantment cost multiplier is 2 for diamond and 1 for iron:
It is possible to make a Smelting, Fortune, Mending diamond pickaxe but it can only be repaired with a single diamond at a time, or a damaged sacrifice, making repairs more difficult; iron is even cheaper (the repair cost itself depends on durability) but again you sacrifice durability and speed, and none of these even had Unbreaking (you could swap it with Mending and use rubies to lower the penalty, but rubies themselves are only found in specific biomes and require additional anvil uses and XP):
The sacrifice has 600 durability missing, resulting in 1148 durability restored per repair (for comparison, one unit restores 1171 durability to an amethyst tool so diamond is more cost-effective if you can afford the time and effort to wear down tools):
(the way Mojang implemented Mending is very unbalanced since any item, no matter how heavily enchanted it is or its inherent quality, costs the same, just 0.5 XP per durability or 0.125 XP per use with Unbreaking III; even anvil repairing is only 2 levels for any item or 1 level per unit - if they had retained the old repair system and made Mending simply stop the penalty from increasing you'd have to make trade-offs as shown above, instead of making uber-items with every possible enchantment, at least if you wanted to be able to repair them)
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Even if gear were limited to only 4 enchantments each for indefinite repairs to be possible I would still be okay with it because it would still be possible to craft useful equipment with this, equipment which can be practically used for large scale projects such as mansions, castles, cities, floating islands and what have you.
You offered a decent compromise for negating prior work penalty with the rubies suggestion, which as you said would only be found in certain biomes.
Where we disagree here is limiting tool or armour repairs to one diamond at a time, how would you fully repair something if say your enchanted Pickaxe only had 10% durability remaining? having that cost more than 39XP levels to do the full repair on top of the cost of the diamond is pretty steep if you ask me.
I am not sure if allowing Smelting on the same tool as Fortune is a good idea though, Smelting is a very powerful enchantment idea that would allow players to entirely skip the process of using furnaces to process their resources for crafting, as the ingots would already be made for them.
It would be a useful enchant, don't get me wrong, but I don't much like the idea of making furnaces less useful.
Forcing players to choose either Fortune or Smelting would at least guarantee that furnaces remain a useful block for things
other than making charcoal, processing mineral blocks into decoration ones or cooking food.
Simple - you repair items incrementally, as I've been doing for nearly all my gear in TMCW (amethyst gear is so expensive that even unenchanted items can only be repaired with one unit at a time, though they do restore 3/4 the durability of a full repair of a diamond item), and used to do in vanilla back when I used an Efficiency V, Fortune III, Unbreaking III diamond pickaxe for all mining while caving (each repair costs 37 levels for one diamond to restore 25% of the full durability; expensive? I've never needed XP farms, just entirely relying off of XP from mining ores and killing mobs, and not like you'd use a Fortune pickaxe on non-ore blocks if it came to that, or general building, clearing out an area, and so on - modern Minecraft players are spoiled by the low costs of using Mending enabling them to just use one "god tier" item for everything, except for maybe choosing between Silk Touch and Fortune, or Infinity and Mending (an exclusion I disagree with).
As seen here, I've mined over 2 million blocks with an amethyst pickaxe, 429 repairs at 1171 durability and 4684 uses (with Unbreaking III) per unit; based on current costs (43, 45, 47 levels per repair, then 21 levels for a ruby, averaging 2633 XP per repair) I've spent about 1.1 million XP, but that is less than half the total XP I've collected (averaging 6600 XP per play session, during which I repair it once):
Not only that, two of the 3 pickaxes I made don't have Mending; the first one had Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, Mending while the second had Efficiency V, Smelting, Unbreaking III, Smelting and the third and by far most-used pickaxe has Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, Vein Miner II (I find the ability to mine entire veins (up to 8 blocks for level II) in one go to be far more valuable than not having to smelt them; overpowered? Less than 10% of the time I spend caving is spent on mining ores even without it, and most players just couldn't care less - just look at the replies to this post, "how much mining do you do?", on a site that is orders of magnitude more active than this one (I've never been able to have any success on Reddit, no matter how impressive my achievements may be, even compared to builds like a dirt house - really (yes, a bit more than your usual dirt house, but I undoubtedly spent far more effort on caving) - which shows just how far removed from the heart of the game most players are).
Also, incremental repairs have one huge advantage - I don't need to watch the durability when it gets down to near 0 because it never does, even after delaying repairing my pickaxe (by far my most-used item) in order to repair all 3 pieces of armor it never got much below 50% durability and I caught up over the next two repairs (repairing it as soon as I had enough levels). This is also the main advantage of amethyst even if it can't be repaired as much at once as diamond (1171 durability per unit vs 1561 for a full repair, but even 50% durability left is 9372 uses remaining with Unbreaking III).
Note also that repair costs of 40+ levels are specific to my amethyst items - vanilla items cap out at 39 levels; the reason for the difference is because the much higher durability of amethyst greatly increases the cost (iron costs 2 levels for a full repair while diamond costs 17 levels, all just because it has 6 times the durability, with amethyst tripling it yet again, the per-unit repair cost is 1 for iron, 3 for diamond, and 21 for amethyst).
You also keep saying that there should be a hard limit of 4 enchantments, but why? Why not just base it on the costs of the enchantments, just like vanilla did before 1.8? Better enchantments should cost more so you can't have as many and vice-versa, same for the item's durability affecting repair costs (a gold item with 5 enchantments? Sure, since gold is very weak and limited in usefulness; a Smelting gold pickaxe is only effective on gold ore (which I changed since other materials can mine themselves) and gets only 131 uses per repair with Unbreaking III, and with Efficiency V it is no faster than other materials on most blocks due to the way the calculations work).
Also, you could possibly (not tested) put Unbreaking I and/or Efficiency I, maybe II-III, on one of the pickaxes in my previous post since Efficiency I only costs 1 level (5 for Efficiency V) and Unbreaking I likewise only costs 2 levels (6 for Unbreaking III); in other words, low-quality enchantments cost less so you can put more on, but without the full benefit of the maximum level (the same could be done for Fortune; Fortune I costs 4 levels while Fortune III costs 12). If necessary, the costs of enchantments could even be rearranged to better reflect their value; I made Mending cost 8 levels instead of 4, conversely, I halved the cost of Thorns from 8 to 4 (24 to 12 for Thorns III).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Going by your system in theory I could still use specific purpose pickaxes for different things such as:
General building and terrain clearance:
Efficiency 5, Unbreaking 3 and Mending.
Efficiency 5 would be useful for mining obsidian, because sometimes you encounter lava even on the surface level of the Overworld, it's rare but can happen, even underground you may wish to build a basement or an underground warehouse to store items in chests or barrels.
The enchantments needed would be Efficiency, any level, although I do not like efficiency 5 shovels as they tend to make it harder to make perfect squares of leveled terrain out of due to clearing away dirt blocks too fast, therefore it becomes too easy to demolish an adjacent block by accident.
For mining the enchantments on pickaxes would be:
Either Fortune or Silk Touch, with Unbreaking III and Mending, to keep the enchanting cost down and likewise repair cost with it.
It's just that the problem is the more of these we end up carrying around the more inventory space is used up
And the more time I have to mine to keep my tools in top shape, as with anybody else, it means build style Mnecraft players like ourselves have less time to be doing the builds we want, because we're always on the lookout for more resources to maintain our equipment. I understand there are players who wish to have the game be made more challenging, however at what point does nerfing something become too excessive or unfair? how much more time should players be expected to spend mining in order to get their dream worlds finished so they have something to show for all their efforts?
I can support fortune compatibility with it.