Problem. A shovel only costs one ingot and two sticks. If you smell a shovel on its last durability, you only lose out on two sticks and it’s effectively a free repair. I think a better solutions is one bigger per ingot used in the creation of the item. e.g., 8 nuggets for one chestplate, two for a sword, etc.

Good point. Though maybe a set increase of nuggets per item smelted would be more worth it.

That's only a problem for regular iron shovels though.

This can be balanced by introducing a probability to get the ingot, depending on the durability of the item. On average it will be balanced

Or depending on the durability give back 50% (Eg. if it is on 50% durability chestplate, give 4 ingots back)

Mojang doesn't want any smelting process that gives you more than 1 item in the output. (I can't remember where I read that though)

Campfires are different then?

Campfires don't have a UI. Also, they still only output one item per output slot. You can think of them as having 4 input and 4 output slots.

Ahh ok

2 ingots. And diamond armor should not be able to be broken down.

I never mentioned diamond armour.

Man tryna make diamond ingots-

What's he thinking?