Minecraft Durability Calculator

How durability works

Every tool, weapon and armor piece carries a durability number: the count of points it can lose before it breaks. The maximum is fixed by the item and, for tools, weapons and armor, by the material it is made from. Using the item spends points; repairing it gives them back, never past the maximum. Nothing else on this page changes that maximum, including Unbreaking.

Two things decide how long an item actually lasts. Unbreaking gives each use a chance of costing nothing, which spreads the same points over more uses. Repair refills the points, either one material unit at a time or by merging two copies of the same item. The panels above cover both. This page counts each use as one point of durability, which is how the expected-use figures below should be read.

Tool and weapon durability by material

Swords, pickaxes, axes, shovels and hoes share a single durability for each material, so a diamond sword and a diamond hoe both start at 1,561. The ranking holds one surprise: gold is the weakest tool material at 32 points, below even wood. Copper slots in between stone and iron. Netherite adds 470 points over diamond, a gain of about 30%.

Source: minecraft.wiki, Durability § Tool and weapon durability, retrieved 2026-09-26.

Bows, tridents, elytra and other single items

Items that do not come in materials have one value each. The fishing rod is the only item in the table below with a different number per edition: 64 in Java and 384 in Bedrock. At the other end of the scale a carrot on a stick has just 25, while the crossbow, at 465, outlasts an iron tool almost twice over. The trident matches iron at 250, and the mace doubles it at 500.

Source: minecraft.wiki, Durability § Tool and weapon durability, retrieved 2026-09-26.

To see how hard those bows, crossbows and tridents actually hit, including Power, Impaling and firework rockets, use the ranged damage section of the Damage & Armor Calculator.

Armor durability

Armor depends on the slot as well as the material. In every material the chestplate lasts longest, then the leggings, then the boots, and the helmet least. Chainmail and iron share exactly the same four numbers. Unlike golden tools, golden armor is not the weakest set: leather is lower in every slot. The turtle shell exists only as a helmet, and its 275 sits between an iron helmet and a diamond one.

Source: minecraft.wiki, Durability § Armor durability, retrieved 2026-09-26.

What Unbreaking really does

Unbreaking never raises the numbers in the tables above. It changes how often a use actually takes a point away, and it does that differently for armor than for everything else.

For tools and weapons, a use costs a point with a chance of 1 in (level + 1): every time with no enchantment, half the time at level I, a third of the time at II and a quarter of the time at III. On average the item therefore lasts (level + 1) times as long, which is where the familiar 2×, 3× and 4× come from.

Armor gets a much weaker version. The chance that a damage event costs a point is 60% plus 40% divided by (level + 1): 80% at level I, about 73.3% at II and 70% at III. Dividing the durability by that chance gives the average number of events, so the multipliers are 1.25×, about 1.36× and about 1.43×. Unbreaking III turns a netherite pickaxe's 2,031 points into 8,124 expected uses; on a netherite chestplate it turns 592 points into about 845.7 expected damage events.

Which rule, stated plainly. The wiki's Durability page words the 1 in (level + 1) rule as though it covered every item, while its Unbreaking page gives armor the separate rule above; this page follows the Unbreaking page, which also says the enchantment behaves the same in Java and Bedrock. The armor rule is applied to the pieces in the armor table, turtle shell included, and the tool rule to everything in the two tables before it, elytra and shield included, because that is how the Durability page groups them.

These are averages. Unbreaking rolls on every use, so a single pickaxe can give out earlier or later than the table says; across many tools the average is what you get. The two grids below are for Java. In Bedrock, add the extra use first and then multiply, as the next section explains.

Computed from minecraft.wiki, Durability § Tool and weapon durability and the Unbreaking page, retrieved 2026-09-26.

Computed from minecraft.wiki, Durability § Armor durability and the Unbreaking page, retrieved 2026-09-26.

Java vs Bedrock: the extra use

The two editions agree on almost every maximum, but the Durability page records a Bedrock bug that lets an item be used once more before it breaks. This page models that as one extra use for every Bedrock item, added before Unbreaking multiplies. A diamond pickaxe with Unbreaking III therefore averages 1,562 × 4 = 6,248 uses in Bedrock against 6,244 in Java.

The fishing rod is the exception. Its Bedrock figure, 384, is listed separately from the Java 64, so no extra use is stacked on top of it: a Bedrock fishing rod with no Unbreaking is good for 384. For everything else the gap is small, one use before Unbreaking and at most four after it, but the Edition switch in the panel shows it.

Repairing: three ways to put durability back

Material units at an anvil

Place the damaged item in an anvil with its repair material. Each unit restores a quarter of the item's maximum durability, rounded down, and the result stops at the maximum. A diamond pickaxe has 1,561 points, so one diamond restores 390: from 200 it goes to 590. Each unit costs 1 level at the anvil, and an item that has already been through an anvil costs more than that; this page leaves that surcharge to the tool linked at the end of this section rather than estimating it.

Two copies in a grindstone or crafting grid

Two copies of the same item, placed together in a grindstone or a crafting grid, come out as one item holding the durability of both plus a bonus of one twentieth of the maximum, rounded down, and capped at the maximum. Two iron pickaxes at 100 each give 100 + 100 + 12 = 212. Two diamond pickaxes at 1,400 each would add up to 2,878, so they simply come out full at 1,561. Either route strips the enchantments off, so it is the method for plain gear.

Two copies at an anvil

The anvil does the same merge with a larger bonus: the second item's durability is added along with 12% of the maximum, again capped at the maximum, for a cost of 2 levels. The same two iron pickaxes give 100 + 100 + 30 = 230. Enchantments are not lost this way: the anvil keeps those on both items and merges them.

Got enchanted books to add as well, or gear that has been through the anvil a few times? The Minecraft Enchantment Calculator finds the cheapest order to combine books and counts the prior work penalty, so you see the cost before the anvil says “Too Expensive”.

One gap in the source, disclosed. The Anvil mechanics page gives the merge bonus as 12% of the maximum durability but does not say how a fraction is handled. For an item with 250 points the bonus is a whole 30; for a diamond item it is 187.32. This page rounds down, as the Item repair page does for its own two rules, and the planner shows the unrounded figure whenever rounding changes anything.

Which method to use comes down to what you have. Material units are the efficient route when the material is at hand, a quarter of the bar per unit. Merging needs a second copy of the item, which makes it the only option for the items below that have no repair material.

Source: minecraft.wiki, Item repair, retrieved 2026-09-26; the Anvil mechanics page agrees.

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