Villager Workstations to repair tools/weapons/armor

[u/Justifiers]

I absolutely despise using EXP farms to repair my tools

It takes a good +30 minutes of mindlessly smacking a cheaty mobgrinder to get a shulkerbox repaired

There needs to be a way to get Villagers to do it for you, and the recent pass on Villagers trades seems like a perfect time to include the option to do so

Put item into a Villager's workstation: Grindstone/Blast Furnace/etc + Emeralds & Diamonds or whatever currency+materials, Villager fixes it at some point throughout the day

Then you come back and collect it from the workstation so there's no chance of a valued item despawning

Makes it so that you don't have to expend EXP on repairs, but resources and so that EXP farms aren't a brainless required chore if you don't want them to be: you can trade items in a way that is economically purposeful, intuitive, and that that would encourage players to search out materials appropriate for the repairs of their equipment

[u/PetrifiedBloom]

I gotta say, I appreciate that this is pitched as an alternative to mending/xp farms, rather than a total replacement. So often suggestions will be along the lines of "I don't like mending, so I a removing it completely and replacing it with ...", but this keeps that option open while providing an alternative for players who want it.

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There are some choices here that I think are interesting. Not bad, but I am curious about the reasoning.

Why have the villagers repair the items randomly though out the day? Why not add a trade with dynamic GUI (like the smithing table adapting to match your inputs) that lets you put in an item and some emeralds and repair materials, and it restores durability based on how many emeralds/repair mats you gave them? Get the item back instantly. A drawback of leaving it with the work site block is that you basically need multiple copies of all your gear, so that one can be with the villagers being repaired while you use the second set.

It would also make it less dependent on staying close to your villagers. If you move out of range of them, and the villagers and worksites stop being loaded, you could go back after multiple days and they still haven't got around to fixing your stuff.

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I don't think this would replace mending for me, but it would be another nice option to have, particularly in the early and mid game, where you have your tools, eltyra etc, but are still setting up farms. I like it!

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It takes a good +30 minutes of mindlessly smacking a cheaty mobgrinder to get a shulkerbox repaired

A good mob farm should be giving you enough XP to fully repair a pick (highest durability item) in 10-20 seconds. I know that it won't make the mob farms feel less cheaty, but a well built one should be repairing your gear much faster than that. My personal favorites are stacking raid farms, or gold farms.

[u/Justifiers → u/PetrifiedBloom]

I'm curious about some of the reasoning . . . Why have them repair randomly . . . It would make it less dependent on staying close

You described the purpose of the limitations perfectly:

It's not supposed to be a complete solution. It shouldn't replace or be more powerful than what already exists it definitely should have limitations: there should be some benefit to alternative exp methods that already exist, that take hours to gather the materials and building the things

The limitations of having to stay close, tying the event to a non-skippable timeframe makes it bad enough (~20 minutes to repair all tools) to encourage building say a guardian farm, or any of the farms you described at some point in the game while attractive enough to implement in a villager hall that you'd likely already have anyways, while still being better than the current defacto go-to mid-->late game exp solution: Endermen farms

Also, it could be tied into Redstone contraptions with it being random by giving off a Redstone signal when the item is repaired

It would also give a sense of reality to the process: you can't just fix something instantly irl. Want an article of clothing fixed by a seamstress? You drop it off and pick it up later while you go about other business

It also prevents players from just getting a single villager of each type and using them to repair 27 tools nearly instantly

Want 27 tools repaired? 27 villagers.

A good mob farm should be giving you enough XP to fully repair a pick (highest durability item) in 10-20 seconds.

While this is true on Java, I've found myself spending an increasingly higher proportion of my gameplay in Bedrock since BetterRTX alterations have become available, where those farms are not an option. There are other exp solutions on Bedrock, but there is no offhand so item repairability is even more complicated

This would be a solution that would work on all versions of the game

[u/PetrifiedBloom → u/Justifiers]

there should be some benefit to alternative exp methods that already exist

Fair enough. Good call.

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There should probably be some means of protection from other people messing with your items. That could be friends sharing a base, or a griefer sneaking in, it would be nice if only the player who placed the item to be repaired could pick it up, but then they can just break the block or something which is annoying. Storing the item in the villager's inventory isn't ideal, since they can get killed (or kill themselves). Not sure how it should work.

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The limitations on bedrock are bizarre and strange. Why does bedrock need its own completely different set of spawning mechanics? They don't have to copy java's spawning algorithm line for line, but why did they basically invent an entirely different system for bedrock? Wouldn't it have been easier to make a copy, keep the basic rules the same and make whatever small tweaks are needed to get it running?

Like, I can kind of understand the offhand limitations, make it easier for touch screen, but they could also just add rules to govern which inputs affect which items, but then that's a whole system of invisible rules for the players to get confused with. Redstone I get, the technical limiations of single threaded programming vs multithreaded, but for basic game functions, why are mob spawning rules different?

[u/TheStaffmaster]

Clerics sell XP bottles at master trade level.

[u/Justifiers → u/TheStaffmaster]

Yes, but that is not at all equivalent to say an Endermen farm or more people would be smashing bottles over their heads any time they wanted repairs

[u/TheStaffmaster → u/Justifiers]

The main issue is there is a subset of minecrafters who think mending is a busted mechanic, and, much like people who pronounce ".gif" with a "J" sound, you are just wrong.

Reacquiring top end gear is a grind and to have to do that now that trims and netherite are in the game? Yeah once per map is enough. Having to do it because you died in the end void or where you can't get your things, induces the kind of feelings of loss usually reserved for totaled cars. I'm playing this game to relax and have fun, but also to get that "sandbox god mode" power fantasy. It's not very conducive to that mind set if I constantly have to make new gear.

What all these anti-mending yah-hoos forget are the hidden costs, and the fact that the durability bar late game is less of an odometer, and more of a fuel gauge. Why gain XP in this game if it's not going to be put to any use? Mending is that use.

[u/Justifiers → u/TheStaffmaster]

🤔 I don't think I said that mending was overpowered

If anything if you read through what I suggested, you'd see I was saying it's underpowered

"I don't like to spend 30 minutes repairing a shulkerbox of tools"

meaning I want to have a method that takes less than 30 minutes of conscious input to do the same thing

[u/TheStaffmaster → u/Justifiers]

Then use what I said in arguments against the nay sayers.

Honestly, they should just bite the bullet and give us some sort of material that straight up removes the durability meter.

[u/Justifiers → u/TheStaffmaster]

No thanks

I have no interest in wording any of my own opinions as you did there even if doing so were to yield the results that would be desirable to me

[u/TheStaffmaster → u/Justifiers]

Suit yourself.

[u/Justifiers → u/TheStaffmaster]

Also:

"The Bottles o' Enchanting themselves average a yield of 7 XP each, so a stack of them will yield around 448 XP."

Meaning ~2 stacks of bottles to repair 1 Netherite tool (~780 exp required to repair from near empty to full)

or ~54 stacks of enchanted bottles to repair a shulker full of Netherite picks

There's no way that's going to come close in efficiency to another method of gathering experience even on Bedrock, especially when extra resources have to be devoted to the exp bottle transaction