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Tools that never break

Workers do not break their tools: shortly before a tool would break, they give it back. This guide sets up a corner of your village where those tools are repaired and go back to work by themselves, and where the experience your guards collect pays for the repairs.

How it works

  • Worn tools. Once a tool has only 10 % of its durability left (at least 2 uses), the worker stops using it and gives it back: into a village chest where a smith or weaponsmith repairs it, otherwise into an output chest of its workstation, so you see that it needs a new one. Wooden and stone tools, shears and fishing rods are used up instead, unless they are enchanted or renamed. See Worn tools.
  • New tools. A worker without a usable tool takes one from a village chest in reach, the most worn one first. It never takes a worn one, and it leaves enchanted and renamed tools alone: give those to it yourself.
  • Repairing. The smith at a smithing table repairs the worn tools in the village chests with material from its input chest, like an anvil: iron ingots for iron tools, diamonds for diamond tools. The weaponsmith at a grindstone grinds two worn tools of the same kind into one, without material. Both put the result back into the village chest, where the workers take it again.
  • Experience. Bows, shears and fishing rods have no repair material, and enchanted items cost experience at an anvil. For both the smith uses bottles o' enchanting: guards get the experience of the monsters they shoot and fill it into glass bottles, 7 per bottle.

What you need

  • a village chest (or several) within 48 blocks of the workers' workstations (and 24 up or down)
  • a smithing table and a smith, with an input chest
  • optional: a grindstone and a weaponsmith
  • for the experience: a target and a guard, glass bottles from an apothecary or yourself
  • a few spare tools for the workers to start with

1. Village chest

Place the village chest in the middle of your workplaces. Right-click it: the tab of the workers it serves lists everyone in reach. Put a few spare tools in, iron ones are worth repairing. A worker whose tool is worn gives it back here and takes a spare on the same walk.

2. Smith → repairs

Place a smithing table within 48 blocks of the village chest and link a chest next to it as input: put iron ingots (and diamonds, planks, ... for other tools) in. Assign a smith and give it its wage. It takes the worn tools from the village chest, up to 4 at a time, repairs them with the material from its input chest and puts them back.

3. Guard → bottles o' enchanting

Place a target where monsters come at night, assign a guard and give it a bow, arrows and glass bottles. In the morning it fills the experience of its kills into bottles and brings them to its output chest, together with what the monsters dropped.

Link the guard's output chest as an input chest of the smith, too: one chest for both. The smith takes the bottles from there; the rest of the loot (rotten flesh, bones, arrows) stays and you empty it now and then. Do not make the village chest the guard's output chest: the loot would fill it up.

The chest has to be within 16 blocks of the target and of the smithing table, or a carrier brings the bottles over.

4. Weaponsmith → two worn tools into one (optional)

Place a grindstone within 48 blocks of the village chest and assign a weaponsmith. It looks for two worn tools of the same kind in the village chests (two iron axes) and grinds them into one, with the durability of both plus 5 %, which saves the smith's ingots. Enchanted and renamed tools it leaves to the smith. With an order it also forges new tools; with the village chest as its output chest the workers take them from there.

5. Pay everybody

Each worker takes one emerald a day. Put emeralds into the village chest as well: the workers in reach take their wage for a few days from there.

Ideas to extend it

  • An apothecary makes the glass bottles for the guard from glass, and a kiln operator fires the glass from sand.
  • The weaponsmith disenchants the loot of the guards and the fisher's treasure and fills that experience into bottles too; the librarian enchants books and tools with the bottles.
  • A miner and a smith at a blast furnace make the iron ingots for the repairs.