help my mending isnt working. it only repears stuff when i kill with it for example i have mending on my armor and tools but when i use my sword (not broken) it doesnt reapir the other stuff even when i only have my tools in inventory and i kill with something that isnt the tools i get levels when i want tot repair my armour i have to kill witht that armor piece so my elytra and chest plate have a kdr of about infinite/0 so its broken. im sick of this someone please help what do i do
This is how Mending works; it only repairs items in your hands or armor slots - you must be using the item for it to be repaired - that's how Mojang decided to balance what many see as an extremely overpowered enchantment (after all, you can maintain any item, even something with like 6-7 enchantments, forever for the cost of only easy to obtain XP).
If you think the current mechanics are bad, before they added Mending you could only repair an item up to 6 times before it became too expensive to repair; worse, the 6 repair limit included any other operations with the anvil so items with more than a few enchantments were generally not worth making. In versions prior to 1.8 you could get around the "too expensive" mechanic by renaming an item but the repair cost was much higher; I still play in 1.6.4 and I have to spend 33 levels and 3 diamonds to repair a diamond pickaxe with Efficiency V and Unbreaking III - just two enchantments already almost hits the cost limit, unless you want to repair it with single (non-renewable) diamonds for a far greater cost per durability point (adding Fortune increases the XP cost by 5-fold), then you can get up to 3 enchantments.
That said, due to my unique playstyle I've never had issues getting enough XP to maintain all my gear, even the even more expensive gear in my modded worlds; I average over 5000 XP per play session spent caving, which is enough to restore 10000 durability to Mending items (I've only actually spent like 30 minutes playing in 1.9+ to see how different things really were, including Mending, but I had absolutely no problems keeping my gear fully repaired, and this was before they buffed Mending in 1.16 so it only tries to repair items that need it; previously if you had undamaged armor and one held item only 1/5 of the XP would go to the damaged item, now all of it does).
Note that some tools will naturally mend while using and others will not, or only very, very slowly. This is because some tools will naturally generate experience while being used, (fishing rods and pick axes), while others do not, (shovels and axes when used as a tool). To force mend these tools, place the tool in the hand. Remove any armor that isn't fully mended. Then trade with villagers. Presto!, the experience gained while trading will mend the tool. It's also possible to mend tools through other activities but it requires quickly switching the item in your hand before the experience is collected, which may or may not be possible depending how close you are to the experience source. Hunting with a bow is the most practical of methods as the distance allows for the use of the bow to kill then plenty of time to switch to a hand held tool before collecting the experience.
In short: take the item you want to repair in the offhand and gather exp. Unequip everything with mending that you don't want to repair.
I don't see any reason to take off anything you don't want to repair, unless you are in 1.15 or earlier, and you may as well repair everything at once:
1.16 20w06a Mending now repairs only items that are damaged instead of picking items at random.
This means that repairs will initially be slower if you have multiple damaged items but as they become fully repaired the remaining damaged items will receive a greater proportion of the XP, with the most damaged item eventually receiving all the XP until it is fully repaired, only then will it be added to your XP bar (previously, the game would randomly choose a Mending item and if it did not need to be repaired it would simply add it to your XP bar instead of choosing another item). Armor in particular is also unlikely to have been damaged that much since it is constantly being repaired during normal use as XP from both mobs and mining will repair it.
Note that some tools will naturally mend while using and others will not, or only very, very slowly. This is because some tools will naturally generate experience while being used, (fishing rods and pick axes), while others do not, (shovels and axes when used as a tool). To force mend these tools, place the tool in the hand. Remove any armor that isn't fully mended. Then trade with villagers. Presto!, the experience gained while trading will mend the tool. It's also possible to mend tools through other activities but it requires quickly switching the item in your hand before the experience is collected, which may or may not be possible depending how close you are to the experience source. Hunting with a bow is the most practical of methods as the distance allows for the use of the bow to kill then plenty of time to switch to a hand held tool before collecting the experience.
Unbreaking also helps.
And I would definitely use a mending axe as a weapon.
And I would definitely use a mending axe as a weapon.
I'd argue unbreaking makes the mending enchantment unnecessarily complex and time consuming to put on the item.
Sure it gives your items a chance to ignore incoming damage, therefore making them last much longer on average,
which is especially useful for gold items that would break too quickly without it, even with mending.
But it increases the repair cost of the item, further demonstrating how broken the anvil mechanics are.
The anvil could have been used to rebalance mending in the best possible way, but someone in the Mojang development team decided to just have mending auto repair indefinitely without having to use the anvil ever again, provided you kept the XP orbs coming.
My opinion on Unbreaking though, it exists in the game to make up for the poor durability of items.
I'm not sure if I agree with its existence myself, high quality tool materials shouldn't be weak to start with.
But it increases the repair cost of the item, further demonstrating how broken the anvil mechanics are.
But with Mending, or even pre-1.8 anvil repairing and/or TMCW's Mending (which instead keeps the prior work penalty down), it significantly decreases the repair costs and/or material or trading costs - 4 times the effective durability means only 1/4 as much XP required per use since any Mending item has 2 durability restored per XP, no matter what enchantments it has - which is a huge deal - I myself simply could not live without it* - even with my extremely unique playstyle that grants me enormous amounts of XP I'd actually need to use XP farms to get all the XP I need, which would in turn be simply game-breaking as I would have to waste countless hours building and AFKing at XP farms to repair my gear instead of spending virtually all my time playing for fun without a care in the world. Also, as long as Mending exists in its current form anvils are completely out of the game when it comes to repairing.
*For example, in TMCWv4 I mined 982051 blocks with an amethyst pickaxe with Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, Mending, which costs 43 levels to restore 1171 durability or 4684 uses per repair, meaning that I repaired it about 209 times for an XP cost of 454993 XP out of a total of 1215292 XP gained while caving - even this single item already consumed over a third of all the XP I collected! Without Unbreaking the cost is reduced to 36 levels per repair but the number of repairs increases to 838 for an overall cost of 1091076 XP - which is now 90% of the XP I gained; there is no way I'd be able to afford repairing everything else that I use. Not only that, I'd have had to use more amethyst than I'd have collected even if I used Fortune on it as I only found 348 ore, or about 765 drops with Fortune III (unlike diamond it is not renewable except for very rare mob drops, and even then you'd have to spend up to 4 times the effort to trade for it; in my first world I have to bring 1-2 stacks of hay bales per trip back to my main base to keep up with my emerald needs, and trading was a lot cheaper back then).
Things would be even worse if not for the much greater durability of armor (I made all armor pieces have the durability of the chestplate, and made diamond have the same durability relative to tools as iron, or 1500 per piece, with amethyst having 4500, and Unbreaking is more effective on armor (2x vs 1.43x for Unbreaking III), which significantly reduces armor maintenance costs and the overall XP cost differences between TMCW's amethyst and vanilla's diamond, with the main difference being the resource rarity, where I use the equivalent of around 20% of the diamond I find in vanilla vs 80% of amethyst in TMCW; of the 348 ore I found, plus items in chests, I ended up with less than stack of surplus).
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You definitely want to stack Unbreaking III with your mending - it'll help keep your gear from getting too low to begin with. If you have mending (and unbreaking!) on your armor, just general occaisionaly combat should keep it all in top condition; same with weapons. Fishing rods and fortune-enchanted tools generally stay mended through general use. For the others, easiest is to fish/breed animals/trade with villagers with the tool in your off-hand; fortune-pickaxe a stack or three of silk-touched ores with the tool to be mended in your off-hand; or smelt a bunch of things and remove them from the furnace with the tool/weapon in either hand. If you've been mining/caving long enough to wear your mending-enchanted pickaxes/shovels down to the red, it's probably a good time to take a break and process some ores anyway...
You definitely want to stack Unbreaking III with your mending - it'll help keep your gear from getting too low to begin with. If you have mending (and unbreaking!) on your armor, just general occaisionaly combat should keep it all in top condition; same with weapons. Fishing rods and fortune-enchanted tools generally stay mended through general use. For the others, easiest is to fish/breed animals/trade with villagers with the tool in your off-hand; fortune-pickaxe a stack or three of silk-touched ores with the tool to be mended in your off-hand; or smelt a bunch of things and remove them from the furnace with the tool/weapon in either hand. If you've been mining/caving long enough to wear your mending-enchanted pickaxes/shovels down to the red, it's probably a good time to take a break and process some ores anyway...
I do like to use unbreaking 3 for some of my gear with mending, I wouldn't give it up if I had the XP for it and the necessary books to use, although sometimes it is a better idea to use the enchantment table to get unbreaking 3 on the item first.
But items that are stronger than gold wouldn't need it and provided that you make the most efficient use of your gear and don't get hit too many times by enemies, unbreaking III is unnecessary imo. Netherite can last a long time still.
If people are having to use Unbreaking 3 for all their equipment still then it only further demonstrates my point, that the base durability of items is generally weak and inconveniences players too much to deal with.
Unbreaking 3 is a crutch for bad item design imo, especially iron, iron shovels being broken (or at least badly damaged) within less than 1 day and night cycle which is only 20 minutes in Minecraft, yet allegedly, according to some people, iron items need their durability "nerfed".
Sometimes I can't tell if people are trolling or are serious, but either way if Mojang had listened to those ridiculous people,
everyone who plays Minecraft would've had far less reasons to continue using Iron Gear late game.
Sure netherite is cool, but it's also a rare item that cannot be obtained in trades,
I'd rather not be forced to use these if I don't have to. I made 3 netherite shovels primarily because it helps me clear enough terrain to build up my towns, as it would with any other player with this playstyle, none which have anything to do with combat.
On the topic of mending though, if it is to remain in the game as it is now, then we should at least have more restrictions on the number of enchantments per item. Some items have 6 or 7 enchantments on them which makes them too overpowered, 3 or 4 would be more sensible, this way players are forced to use gear that is specific for a task, not good at everything.
If people are having to use Unbreaking 3 for all their equipment still then it only further demonstrates my point, that the base durability of items is generally weak and inconveniences players too much to deal with.
You do realize that base durability is almost meaningless with Mending, right? All that matters is whether you can collect enough XP to offset durability loss - even an item with a million durability will eventually be depleted if you can't collect enough XP - and Unbreaking reduces the XP cost by 4-fold, which is a HUGE difference, plus once you have multiple Mending items the cost to maintain all of them increases - a full set of armor loses 4 times the durability of a single piece since every piece takes damage at the same time, then add in tools and weapons and you might be getting only 1/8 the XP per item (I use 8 items that need to be repaired while caving), maybe even worse per item depending on how much damage it takes and how much XP you get while using it (armor is generally a non-issue but a Silk Touch tool can only get XP by holding it after you've killed a mob or take items out of a furnace, etc. Remember that an item must be held or work to get repaired, which is why the OP had issues repairing their items, and let me remind you that this thread is far off-topic by now - all the OP needed was my reply on how Mending works, not a long discussion about whether Unbreaking is worth using).
My previous post even proved that I simply can't afford to not use Unbreaking; here are the figures again in a clear format:
Total XP collected while caving: 1215292
XP spent to repair my pickaxe: 454993 over 209 repairs (37.4% of the XP collected)
XP spent without Unbreaking: 1091076 over 838 repairs (89.8% of the XP collected)
And that's just for a single item, how would I ever even afford to repair everything else (armor, sword, bow, shears) with only 10% of the XP left over, and those items also costing far more to repair, even if they are repaired much less often (I repaired my pickaxe nearly every day, 209 times over 222 sessions spent caving. Other items probably accounted for a similar amount of XP for around 75% of all the XP I gained going to repairs, 100% if you consider that spending levels when you have more than needed will cost more XP so even if I manage to hit level 60+ I'll just spend most of the XP on a repair soon).
While not a consideration with Mending, I'd have also had to use more resources to repair my items that I'd have collected even with Fortune, and while I trade for diamond gear in my first world I'd have to do a lot more trading, requiring much larger wheat farms and more time spent on harvesting and trading and more precious space taken up by stacks of hay bales on return trips (as it is, I've planted 83,000 wheat and I didn't trade for the entire time I've been playing, and otherwise do not use wheat in any significant amounts. Note also that I've crafted/traded for 596 diamond pickaxes - that would be 2384 without Unbreaking, equivalent to half the diamonds I've collected, again, just for a single item), so all in all it is a massive disadvantage to not use Unbreaking, which is especially valuable in 1.6.4 since you can only get it on weapons and armor if you use books - which i spend many hours mining thousands of quartz to get - why would I do that if there wasn't a major advantage to it?
You do realize that base durability is almost meaningless with Mending, right? All that matters is whether you can collect enough XP to offset durability loss - even an item with a million durability will eventually be depleted if you can't collect enough XP - and Unbreaking reduces the XP cost by 4-fold, which is a HUGE difference, plus once you have multiple Mending items the cost to maintain all of them increases - a full set of armor loses 4 times the durability of a single piece since every piece takes damage at the same time, then add in tools and weapons and you might be getting only 1/8 the XP per item (I use 8 items that need to be repaired while caving), maybe even worse per item depending on how much damage it takes and how much XP you get while using it (armor is generally a non-issue but a Silk Touch tool can only get XP by holding it after you've killed a mob or take items out of a furnace, etc. Remember that an item must be held or work to get repaired, which is why the OP had issues repairing their items, and let me remind you that this thread is far off-topic by now - all the OP needed was my reply on how Mending works, not a long discussion about whether Unbreaking is worth using).
My previous post even proved that I simply can't afford to not use Unbreaking; here are the figures again in a clear format:
Total XP collected while caving: 1215292
XP spent to repair my pickaxe: 454993 over 209 repairs (37.4% of the XP collected)
XP spent without Unbreaking: 1091076 over 838 repairs (89.8% of the XP collected)
And that's just for a single item, how would I ever even afford to repair everything else (armor, sword, bow, shears) with only 10% of the XP left over, and those items also costing far more to repair, even if they are repaired much less often (I repaired my pickaxe nearly every day, 209 times over 222 sessions spent caving. Other items probably accounted for a similar amount of XP for around 75% of all the XP I gained going to repairs, 100% if you consider that spending levels when you have more than needed will cost more XP so even if I manage to hit level 60+ I'll just spend most of the XP on a repair soon).
While not a consideration with Mending, I'd have also had to use more resources to repair my items that I'd have collected even with Fortune, and while I trade for diamond gear in my first world I'd have to do a lot more trading, requiring much larger wheat farms and more time spent on harvesting and trading and more precious space taken up by stacks of hay bales on return trips (as it is, I've planted 83,000 wheat and I didn't trade for the entire time I've been playing, and otherwise do not use wheat in any significant amounts. Note also that I've crafted/traded for 596 diamond pickaxes - that would be 2384 without Unbreaking, equivalent to half the diamonds I've collected, again, just for a single item), so all in all it is a massive disadvantage to not use Unbreaking, which is especially valuable in 1.6.4 since you can only get it on weapons and armor if you use books - which i spend many hours mining thousands of quartz to get - why would I do that if there wasn't a major advantage to it?
Almost yes, but would you refuse to use Unbreaking on a pair of gold boots in the Nether? your reply indicates that you wouldn't.
having the experience myself I can say I wouldn't advise it.
Without unbreaking 3, gold gets busted up too quickly and is likely to break by fighting a group of Magma Cubes,
in fact this is how one of my gold boots got destroyed in the Nether, it didn't have unbreaking 3,
but it also had curse of binding so I there was an upside to losing them.
You can effectively repair items a lot faster by combining unbreaking 3 with mending, by giving items the chance to ignore damage.
I'm just suggesting that when your items are as tough as diamond or netherite, you have ample chances to get the XP orbs you need to prevent your items from being destroyed. And the way mending works is you level up a lot slower, in exchange damaged items with mending that are equipped will continue to be repaired indefinitely.
To give a solution to what the OP was saying, to repeat what you said but in more detail.
My advise is equip all damaged tools to the hotbar, kill enemies with a weapon that isn't badly damaged, then back away, leave the XP orbs on the ground until switching to a tool that needs to be repaired, then collect the XP orbs.
Tools that are not in your hand will not repair
it is only your armour and items on hand that will receive a random XP orb repair.
This is how I repair my gear, same thing with all the players who play on my server, and anyone else who understands how mending works.
I'm not sure if notoucangamer has figured this out by now, but I'm leaving this note for him or her to read
My advise is equip all damaged tools to the hotbar, kill enemies with a weapon that isn't badly damaged, then back away, leave the XP orbs on the ground until switching to a tool that needs to be repaired, then collect the XP orbs.
Tools that are not in your hand will not repair
But you have two hands, unless you're playing an old version.
Can't you just put what you want repaired in your offhand?
help my mending isnt working. it only repears stuff when i kill with it for example i have mending on my armor and tools but when i use my sword (not broken) it doesnt reapir the other stuff even when i only have my tools in inventory and i kill with something that isnt the tools i get levels when i want tot repair my armour i have to kill witht that armor piece so my elytra and chest plate have a kdr of about infinite/0 so its broken. im sick of this someone please help what do i do
This is how Mending works; it only repairs items in your hands or armor slots - you must be using the item for it to be repaired - that's how Mojang decided to balance what many see as an extremely overpowered enchantment (after all, you can maintain any item, even something with like 6-7 enchantments, forever for the cost of only easy to obtain XP).
If you think the current mechanics are bad, before they added Mending you could only repair an item up to 6 times before it became too expensive to repair; worse, the 6 repair limit included any other operations with the anvil so items with more than a few enchantments were generally not worth making. In versions prior to 1.8 you could get around the "too expensive" mechanic by renaming an item but the repair cost was much higher; I still play in 1.6.4 and I have to spend 33 levels and 3 diamonds to repair a diamond pickaxe with Efficiency V and Unbreaking III - just two enchantments already almost hits the cost limit, unless you want to repair it with single (non-renewable) diamonds for a far greater cost per durability point (adding Fortune increases the XP cost by 5-fold), then you can get up to 3 enchantments.
That said, due to my unique playstyle I've never had issues getting enough XP to maintain all my gear, even the even more expensive gear in my modded worlds; I average over 5000 XP per play session spent caving, which is enough to restore 10000 durability to Mending items (I've only actually spent like 30 minutes playing in 1.9+ to see how different things really were, including Mending, but I had absolutely no problems keeping my gear fully repaired, and this was before they buffed Mending in 1.16 so it only tries to repair items that need it; previously if you had undamaged armor and one held item only 1/5 of the XP would go to the damaged item, now all of it does).
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?
Note that some tools will naturally mend while using and others will not, or only very, very slowly. This is because some tools will naturally generate experience while being used, (fishing rods and pick axes), while others do not, (shovels and axes when used as a tool). To force mend these tools, place the tool in the hand. Remove any armor that isn't fully mended. Then trade with villagers. Presto!, the experience gained while trading will mend the tool. It's also possible to mend tools through other activities but it requires quickly switching the item in your hand before the experience is collected, which may or may not be possible depending how close you are to the experience source. Hunting with a bow is the most practical of methods as the distance allows for the use of the bow to kill then plenty of time to switch to a hand held tool before collecting the experience.
In short: take the item you want to repair in the offhand and gather exp. Unequip everything with mending that you don't want to repair.
A cheap exp farm could be a auto fishing farm. (or you could use autofish modifications)
That's of corse painfully slow. I do not suggest to do this on servers.
My projects:
-are abandoned for now. I might pick 'em up in the future.
For now i'm working on a private modpack that suit's my own playstyle.
I am gonna stay in modded 1.12.2 untill my potato dies. No mercy! :Q
I don't see any reason to take off anything you don't want to repair, unless you are in 1.15 or earlier, and you may as well repair everything at once:
This means that repairs will initially be slower if you have multiple damaged items but as they become fully repaired the remaining damaged items will receive a greater proportion of the XP, with the most damaged item eventually receiving all the XP until it is fully repaired, only then will it be added to your XP bar (previously, the game would randomly choose a Mending item and if it did not need to be repaired it would simply add it to your XP bar instead of choosing another item). Armor in particular is also unlikely to have been damaged that much since it is constantly being repaired during normal use as XP from both mobs and mining will repair it.
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?
Unbreaking also helps.
And I would definitely use a mending axe as a weapon.
I'd argue unbreaking makes the mending enchantment unnecessarily complex and time consuming to put on the item.
Sure it gives your items a chance to ignore incoming damage, therefore making them last much longer on average,
which is especially useful for gold items that would break too quickly without it, even with mending.
But it increases the repair cost of the item, further demonstrating how broken the anvil mechanics are.
The anvil could have been used to rebalance mending in the best possible way, but someone in the Mojang development team decided to just have mending auto repair indefinitely without having to use the anvil ever again, provided you kept the XP orbs coming.
My opinion on Unbreaking though, it exists in the game to make up for the poor durability of items.
I'm not sure if I agree with its existence myself, high quality tool materials shouldn't be weak to start with.
No argument there, I was merely pointing out that a mending axe won't mend if used only as a tool.
But with Mending, or even pre-1.8 anvil repairing and/or TMCW's Mending (which instead keeps the prior work penalty down), it significantly decreases the repair costs and/or material or trading costs - 4 times the effective durability means only 1/4 as much XP required per use since any Mending item has 2 durability restored per XP, no matter what enchantments it has - which is a huge deal - I myself simply could not live without it* - even with my extremely unique playstyle that grants me enormous amounts of XP I'd actually need to use XP farms to get all the XP I need, which would in turn be simply game-breaking as I would have to waste countless hours building and AFKing at XP farms to repair my gear instead of spending virtually all my time playing for fun without a care in the world. Also, as long as Mending exists in its current form anvils are completely out of the game when it comes to repairing.
*For example, in TMCWv4 I mined 982051 blocks with an amethyst pickaxe with Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, Mending, which costs 43 levels to restore 1171 durability or 4684 uses per repair, meaning that I repaired it about 209 times for an XP cost of 454993 XP out of a total of 1215292 XP gained while caving - even this single item already consumed over a third of all the XP I collected! Without Unbreaking the cost is reduced to 36 levels per repair but the number of repairs increases to 838 for an overall cost of 1091076 XP - which is now 90% of the XP I gained; there is no way I'd be able to afford repairing everything else that I use. Not only that, I'd have had to use more amethyst than I'd have collected even if I used Fortune on it as I only found 348 ore, or about 765 drops with Fortune III (unlike diamond it is not renewable except for very rare mob drops, and even then you'd have to spend up to 4 times the effort to trade for it; in my first world I have to bring 1-2 stacks of hay bales per trip back to my main base to keep up with my emerald needs, and trading was a lot cheaper back then).
Things would be even worse if not for the much greater durability of armor (I made all armor pieces have the durability of the chestplate, and made diamond have the same durability relative to tools as iron, or 1500 per piece, with amethyst having 4500, and Unbreaking is more effective on armor (2x vs 1.43x for Unbreaking III), which significantly reduces armor maintenance costs and the overall XP cost differences between TMCW's amethyst and vanilla's diamond, with the main difference being the resource rarity, where I use the equivalent of around 20% of the diamond I find in vanilla vs 80% of amethyst in TMCW; of the 348 ore I found, plus items in chests, I ended up with less than stack of surplus).
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?
You definitely want to stack Unbreaking III with your mending - it'll help keep your gear from getting too low to begin with. If you have mending (and unbreaking!) on your armor, just general occaisionaly combat should keep it all in top condition; same with weapons. Fishing rods and fortune-enchanted tools generally stay mended through general use. For the others, easiest is to fish/breed animals/trade with villagers with the tool in your off-hand; fortune-pickaxe a stack or three of silk-touched ores with the tool to be mended in your off-hand; or smelt a bunch of things and remove them from the furnace with the tool/weapon in either hand. If you've been mining/caving long enough to wear your mending-enchanted pickaxes/shovels down to the red, it's probably a good time to take a break and process some ores anyway...
oki, sorry
I do like to use unbreaking 3 for some of my gear with mending, I wouldn't give it up if I had the XP for it and the necessary books to use, although sometimes it is a better idea to use the enchantment table to get unbreaking 3 on the item first.
But items that are stronger than gold wouldn't need it and provided that you make the most efficient use of your gear and don't get hit too many times by enemies, unbreaking III is unnecessary imo. Netherite can last a long time still.
If people are having to use Unbreaking 3 for all their equipment still then it only further demonstrates my point, that the base durability of items is generally weak and inconveniences players too much to deal with.
Unbreaking 3 is a crutch for bad item design imo, especially iron, iron shovels being broken (or at least badly damaged) within less than 1 day and night cycle which is only 20 minutes in Minecraft, yet allegedly, according to some people, iron items need their durability "nerfed".
Sometimes I can't tell if people are trolling or are serious, but either way if Mojang had listened to those ridiculous people,
everyone who plays Minecraft would've had far less reasons to continue using Iron Gear late game.
Sure netherite is cool, but it's also a rare item that cannot be obtained in trades,
I'd rather not be forced to use these if I don't have to. I made 3 netherite shovels primarily because it helps me clear enough terrain to build up my towns, as it would with any other player with this playstyle, none which have anything to do with combat.
On the topic of mending though, if it is to remain in the game as it is now, then we should at least have more restrictions on the number of enchantments per item. Some items have 6 or 7 enchantments on them which makes them too overpowered, 3 or 4 would be more sensible, this way players are forced to use gear that is specific for a task, not good at everything.
You do realize that base durability is almost meaningless with Mending, right? All that matters is whether you can collect enough XP to offset durability loss - even an item with a million durability will eventually be depleted if you can't collect enough XP - and Unbreaking reduces the XP cost by 4-fold, which is a HUGE difference, plus once you have multiple Mending items the cost to maintain all of them increases - a full set of armor loses 4 times the durability of a single piece since every piece takes damage at the same time, then add in tools and weapons and you might be getting only 1/8 the XP per item (I use 8 items that need to be repaired while caving), maybe even worse per item depending on how much damage it takes and how much XP you get while using it (armor is generally a non-issue but a Silk Touch tool can only get XP by holding it after you've killed a mob or take items out of a furnace, etc. Remember that an item must be held or work to get repaired, which is why the OP had issues repairing their items, and let me remind you that this thread is far off-topic by now - all the OP needed was my reply on how Mending works, not a long discussion about whether Unbreaking is worth using).
My previous post even proved that I simply can't afford to not use Unbreaking; here are the figures again in a clear format:
Total XP collected while caving: 1215292
XP spent to repair my pickaxe: 454993 over 209 repairs (37.4% of the XP collected)
XP spent without Unbreaking: 1091076 over 838 repairs (89.8% of the XP collected)
And that's just for a single item, how would I ever even afford to repair everything else (armor, sword, bow, shears) with only 10% of the XP left over, and those items also costing far more to repair, even if they are repaired much less often (I repaired my pickaxe nearly every day, 209 times over 222 sessions spent caving. Other items probably accounted for a similar amount of XP for around 75% of all the XP I gained going to repairs, 100% if you consider that spending levels when you have more than needed will cost more XP so even if I manage to hit level 60+ I'll just spend most of the XP on a repair soon).
While not a consideration with Mending, I'd have also had to use more resources to repair my items that I'd have collected even with Fortune, and while I trade for diamond gear in my first world I'd have to do a lot more trading, requiring much larger wheat farms and more time spent on harvesting and trading and more precious space taken up by stacks of hay bales on return trips (as it is, I've planted 83,000 wheat and I didn't trade for the entire time I've been playing, and otherwise do not use wheat in any significant amounts. Note also that I've crafted/traded for 596 diamond pickaxes - that would be 2384 without Unbreaking, equivalent to half the diamonds I've collected, again, just for a single item), so all in all it is a massive disadvantage to not use Unbreaking, which is especially valuable in 1.6.4 since you can only get it on weapons and armor if you use books - which i spend many hours mining thousands of quartz to get - why would I do that if there wasn't a major advantage to it?
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?
Almost yes, but would you refuse to use Unbreaking on a pair of gold boots in the Nether? your reply indicates that you wouldn't.
having the experience myself I can say I wouldn't advise it.
Without unbreaking 3, gold gets busted up too quickly and is likely to break by fighting a group of Magma Cubes,
in fact this is how one of my gold boots got destroyed in the Nether, it didn't have unbreaking 3,
but it also had curse of binding so I there was an upside to losing them.
You can effectively repair items a lot faster by combining unbreaking 3 with mending, by giving items the chance to ignore damage.
I'm just suggesting that when your items are as tough as diamond or netherite, you have ample chances to get the XP orbs you need to prevent your items from being destroyed. And the way mending works is you level up a lot slower, in exchange damaged items with mending that are equipped will continue to be repaired indefinitely.
To give a solution to what the OP was saying, to repeat what you said but in more detail.
My advise is equip all damaged tools to the hotbar, kill enemies with a weapon that isn't badly damaged, then back away, leave the XP orbs on the ground until switching to a tool that needs to be repaired, then collect the XP orbs.
Tools that are not in your hand will not repair
it is only your armour and items on hand that will receive a random XP orb repair.
This is how I repair my gear, same thing with all the players who play on my server, and anyone else who understands how mending works.
I'm not sure if notoucangamer has figured this out by now, but I'm leaving this note for him or her to read
so this clarifies things.
Man, these long responses. I love that you guys enjoy talking about hypotheticals and theory so much, I'm just too tired lately to follow along
But you have two hands, unless you're playing an old version.
Can't you just put what you want repaired in your offhand?
And switch when it's fully repaired.
Just testing.
That would count as a hand wouldn't it not? you need 2 hands to dual wield.
Good point though, that would work, that would be the point of putting mending on say a shield.