Tool repair via anvil game balance problems, proposals

[Fixer-007]

Right now tool repair is almost cheat-level easy, I propose to change it:

• recipe changes:
• • change anvil recipe from 7 steel ingots to 7 steel blocks (you will need 9x more steel to make anvil)
• • possibly also change hammer recipe from steel ingots to full blocks
• disallow repair of hammer with hammer
• assess hammer durability, maybe it is too good currently.
• possibly add another slot for providing steel/diamond/mese repair material for repaired tool
• mined anvil is destroyed (or partially destroyed)

Anvil repair should be much more expensive, since it allows to repair superior diamond tools that allow to mine tons of stuff.

[Thomas--S]

• recipe changes: :+1:
  • change anvil recipe from 7 steel ingots to 7 steel blocks (you will need 9x more steel to make anvil) :+1:
  • possibly also change hammer recipe from steel ingots to full blocks :+1:
• disallow repair of hammer with hammer :-1:
• assess hammer durability, maybe it is too good currently. :-1:

[Sokomine]

Perhaps a hardcore mode would help in this case? Admittedly, repair is pretty cheap. Still, I like it that way.

[fluxionary]

Just some random thoughts from a passerby:

• Making the hammer and anvil expensive will not solve this issue on its own.
• I've certainly encountered forks (or re-writes?) on certain servers, where you can't repair the hammer on the anvil.
• At least one other mod (https://github.com/Terumoc/terumet) has a "tool repair" machine which is entirely useless compared to the hammer anvil. In terumet, you can repair any tool with a wide range of materials, but different materials are more or less useful for repairs, and repairing also requires energy to power the machines.
• Minetest isn't Minecraft, but we crib an awful lot of ideas from it. I've only played recent versions of Minecraft a bit, but it seemed that tool repair had some interesting properties:
  1. It required some amount of material to repair the tool
  2. It required player experience to repair the tool
  3. The more times you repaired the tool, the more expensive it got (at least experience-wise), with an effective cap on the number of times you could repair something.

Adding "experience" feels beyond the scope of the cottages mod, but perhaps there's a way to add metadata to a tool to only allow it to be repaired a certain number of times?