Item Abilities
Overview
In ReInDev there is no enchanting table. Instead, tools and armor carry a single built-in Ability that is determined entirely by the material the item is made from. When an item has an ability, its tooltip shows an extra line in the form Ability: <name> (rendered in yellow) directly above the durability line. Abilities cannot be added, removed, or stacked — choosing a tool or armor material is choosing its ability. Wood, stone-tier armor variants without a special trait, obsidian, and cloth carry no ability line.
The logic lives in ItemDescTool and ItemDescArmor: each reads the item's ToolMaterial / ArmorMaterial and prints the matching item.ability.* string. The actual behaviors are implemented per-block and in the combat code, not in the description classes.
Tool Abilities
Every tool (pickaxe, shovel, axe, hoe, sword) inherits the ability of its material. Four materials grant an ability:
| Material | Tooltip | Example items | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stone | Fortune | Stone Pickaxe, Stone Axe, Stone Sword… | Yields extra drops from certain blocks. Coal Ore mined with a stone tool drops 1–2 coal (rand.nextInt(2)+1) instead of one. |
| Gold | Silk Touch | Gold Pickaxe, Gold Shovel… | Drops the block itself rather than its broken form. Gold tools mine Stone into Stone, Coal Ore into Coal Ore, Glass into Glass, etc. |
| Fire (Molten) | Smelt Touch | Molten Pickaxe, Molten Sword… | Drops the smelted result directly — e.g. Stone mined with a Molten tool drops Polished Stone. Molten tools also set struck mobs on fire (200 ticks) and add Fire Damage in red. |
| Diamond | Haste Over Time | Diamond Pickaxe, Diamond Shovel… | Mining speed scales up as the tool wears down: the dig multiplier is maxDamage / (maxDamage − itemDamage), so a near-broken diamond pickaxe mines faster than a fresh one. Diamond pickaxes also apply this multiplier to Obsidian. |
Note the Fortune drop in this build is a flat extra-roll, not the vanilla multiplicative formula. The Fire material is the "Molten" tier and the Ice material (Frost Damage) exists in code but is not on any craftable tool in 2.9_03. Obsidian tools have very high durability (16384 uses) but no ability line.
Armor Abilities
Armor abilities are tied to the armor material, and most scale with how many pieces of that material you wear (the game counts equipped pieces of each material every tick). The check pattern is "piece count ≥ a random number 1–4," so wearing a full set makes the ability trigger far more often than a single piece.
| Material | Tooltip | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Leather | Fire Resistant | Reduces fire damage and burn duration. While burning, each leather piece lowers the chance of taking fire damage that tick and drains fire faster; leather armor also takes the fire damage instead of you. |
| Chainmail | Thorns | When you are hit and chainmail count ≥ random(1–4), the attacker takes 2 damage back and an armor "clink" plays. |
| Iron | Deflects Arrows | When struck by an arrow and iron count ≥ random(1–4), the arrow is bounced away (its motion is reversed and cut to ~12.5%), it deals no damage, and one iron piece takes durability. |
| Gold | Quicker in Fluids | Increases swim/fluid movement and buoyancy, scaling with gold count (0.01 × (1 + goldCount)). A full gold set (count 4) also negates fall damage in fluids and changes liquid handling. |
| Diamond | Faster when Broken | A speed-related trait that improves as the armor degrades, mirroring the diamond tool's "Haste Over Time" wear scaling. |
Cloth armor (durability 0) and any non-listed material show no ability line.
How Items Gain Abilities
- Craft or obtain the right material. Abilities come free with the material — craft a Gold Pickaxe and it already has Silk Touch; smith Molten tools for Smelt Touch; wear Chainmail for Thorns.
- No upgrading or transfer. You cannot move an ability between items or combine them. To change abilities you change the item.
- Crafting milestones. Crafting tiered tools grants achievements: Getting an Upgrade (stone), Touch of Gold (gold), Melting Point (molten), Keeps Getting Better (diamond), and Time to Mine (any pickaxe).
A related but separate concept is the fire-resistant item entity: some dropped items (handled by EntityItemFireResistant) are immune to fire and lava and will not burn up — this is a property of the dropped item, not a tooltip ability line.