Reflection, Analysis, Benefits and Drawbacks
Phew! That was a long one. Make sure to drink some water. Up next I'll be talking about the benefits and drawbacks of this system. This system has a lot of benefits to the game, but would cause a couple of problems as well, but I think overall it is VASTLY superior to the current horrible grindfest that is vanilla enchanting. Even if you keep the regular enchantments, these enchanting table mechanics are far more engaging than the vanilla ones. Let's take a look.
The enchanting process - benefits
If you've read through this whole document so far, and if you're like me, you probably think this sounds WAY more fun than vanilla enchanting. You can always guarantee the enchantments you want, and you can either play it safe and put a lot of materials into your enchanting table, or play it risky and try to get a cheap enchantment on your item and hope you don't get a curse. If you're crafting maxed gear and don't want to risk even a 1% curse chance, you can use enchanted books as a sort of buffer to guarantee that no curses get on your maxed pickaxe. It's literally free to put throwaway enchantments on throwaway golden tools as well, and you can still make the cool iconic bookshelf setup to get a bonus. That mob farm you built back in 1.17 is still useful, since the monster drops can now be used to help enchant. Gathering the materials to enchant means you'll probably be mining a lot more lapis lazuli, and well, the game is called Minecraft, so that's probably fun! Besides, you probably have like 4 stacks of lapis sitting around doing nothing anyway.
Repairing tools - benefits
In vanilla, mending is super mandatory, because maxed tools are extremely expensive to create, and anvil repairs are effectively limited in supply because of exponentially scaling costs. Under my rework system, repairing a netherite tool still requires a netherite ingot, so you still have to put in some work, but it doesn't also cause massive enchantment problems. Mending is a band-aid fix to a broken repair system. My rework actually fixes the system at its foundation so that mending isn't even necessary. Plus, you no longer need to spend ages deliberating over the final name of your item, since renaming has no penalty.
Player choice - benefits
This new system would introduce a large number of exclusive enchantments, meaning that there would no longer just be a "best" choice for max enchanting, but rather, players will genuinely be able to build their items towards their preferred playstyle. Heck, even protection was split up into plating and warding, so players will be able to take the best one for the situation, or take a mix of both for reduced effects on each! I know I would personally choose plating, but warding is probably better for pvp and for high-skill players trying to fight the warden or something.
The removal of a generalist option from the specialist protection cycle removes the downside of specializing, and allows players to actually think about what they would find most important! Plus, increased weapon and armor variety would introduce an interesting set of counterplay strategies to pvp, where perhaps a player might bring magic protection armor knowing their opponent might be running an injection bow with harming arrows, making it useful to bring a backup strategy such as cobwebs, since the other player would know that if the first player has magic protection, they either don't have any burden protection, or their magic protection isn't on all four armor pieces.
There's also a wider variety of enchantments to get on each item (a maxed pickaxe can have 10), some of which the player might not want to go for due to potential downsides or because it's just not worth the effort for the longevity enchantment or something, so items will vary based on player preference. Additionally, a player might decide to keep a curse that isn't too impactful, such as curse of collision on an elytra (which has no effect if you're good enough to not crash), or might intentionally get a curse, such as curse of obsession or curse of rot, both of which have niche upsides.
Rewards and one trick ponies - benefits
The material guarantee system offers a great opportunity to add some new items to the game as enchanting materials to put in chests as loot! I know mojang is constantly struggling for things to put in chests in new structures, and this would be a great way to fill that out. Additionally, it can help add another purpose to items that are currently only used for one thing, such as turtle and armadillo scutes, which could be added to the enchantment recipes for various things.
Game balance - benefits
Many enchantments in vanilla are currently rather overpowered, especially protection, which combined with diamond or netherite armor makes you take only 7.2% as much damage as you would without armor. The new enchantment set presented provides a wide array of alternative enchantments as mentioned in the previous section, which also comes with balance benefits. Making enchantments be exclusive from each other reduces the effective power of a maxed out item, reducing some of the extreme late-game power creep we see, with players becoming nigh invincible with their 92.3% damage reduction and their totem of undying just to rub it in. Instead, each possible build has a counter, meaning that even in the endgame, you still have to actually be careful and can't just face tank 20 zombies forever. Meanwhile, it still keeps enchantments powerful enough to feel impactful and give the player a worthwhile advantage, such as being able to face-tank several creepers with blast protection (even if you might die to an arrow shot by a skeleton from the same group of monsters).
Having only one level of each enchantment makes it easier to balance something like wind burst, which I know mojang had some trouble with during development. It also reduces that weird balancing issue where stuff like sharpness 3 and fortune 1 are entirely nonviable because it is impossible to combine them without overly scaling the anvil combine cost.
The introduction of material costs and sacrifice value for enchantments makes each enchantment much easier to balance. Something like unbreaking could cost, say, one iron ingot to guarantee, and maybe would only require 8 lapis (or 32 rotten flesh!) to get a 10% curse chance for. Meanwhile, respiration could require a prismarine shard, encouraging players to explore to find the materials to guarantee it, and maybe it would take 16 or 20 lapis to get a 10% curse chance for, so you have to put in a little more effort to apply it.
Game balance - drawbacks
Currently vanilla minecraft enchantments have an additional use: A level 1 throwaway enchantment. These enchantments are something you just toss on whatever tools you have in the earlygame for a slight advantage. My proposed system messes with this by removing enchantment levels, meaning that every enchantment has to be balanced around being max level all the time. I don't think this would be game-breaking, but it is something to keep in mind, it makes basic throwaway enchantments stronger.
Old save portability - drawbacks
Probably the single largest drawback, porting old saves to this new set of enchantments would be a nightmare. This on its own might make the enchantment set I came up with non-viable to add, but the proposed enchanting system's base mechanics could still be adapted without too much fuss. Perhaps my enchantment system could be added by just flattening every enchantment to level 1, deleting enchantments that no longer exist, and just letting illegal enchantment combinations (such as sharpness on swords, or punch and flame bows) exist? Either way, it would be really weird.
Player accessibility - drawbacks
The biggest problem with player accessibility is new players trying to figure out how to guarantee enchantments. Minecraft has a lot of problems with this already, and new systems shouldn't be introducing more and further alienating players who haven't opened the game in 3 years. One way to fix this could be by including outlines for possible items to put in the other slot when you put an item in one slot, making it much easier to figure things out through brute force. Another issue I have concerns about is players figuring out what each of the slots do, but I doubt this is any worse than, say, a furnace, so hopefully it will be fine without too many user interface changes.
Along these accessibility lines, there's a concern I have with allowing a pickaxe to have 16 different enchantments at once. While I have tried making a mockup of what this would look like, and it seems fine so long as you add the new column thing I suggested, it is still something to be wary of.
Sound design - drawbacks
The tinkling sound of experience orbs when I mine a diamond ore feels amazing. It really helps make the diamond feel that much more valuable. As such, removing experience entirely makes breaking a diamond ore just sound like regular stone, which makes it less satisfying. This realistically should be solved by actually improving the sound design of various ores. While we're at it, can we apply the copper block sounds to gold and iron? Minecraft really needs a look through its old sound design, because there's some real bad ones.
Progression - drawbacks
Really grasping at straws here for downsides, but perhaps some players find joy in the arduous process of levelling up their gear, and this rework removes the "number go up" of upgrading from sharpness 4 to sharpness 5. I'm not sure this is a concern at all, but I want to make sure to present a full case here.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading all of this! If you're coming here from my website, go give my minecraft feedback post an upvote at feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/31315252035341-Enchanting-Rework if you'd like to see these features in the game! If you're a mojang employee, I'm honored to have you here, I would greatly appreciate at least some changes to enchanting and xp as a whole, as the current system is jank and unforgiving and updates like the anvil cap and villager rebalance seem to be leaning towards making it even more annoying and difficult without actually addressing the underlying issues. If you do use this idea, I highly doubt you'll use the whole thing, so feel free to take the parts you like and leave the parts you don't! If you have any questions, feedback, or just want to say hi, you can contact me on my neocities profile at www.neocities.org/site/aurora-spirit. Have a wonderful day, night, or extraterrestrial unit of time, and may there be no monsters nearby your bed.
Note: Just learned that external links aren't allowed in minecraft feedback posts! I'm mad! My post makes me sound like a raving lunatic, because it's impossible for me to describe my ideas in 1500 characters without abstracting away so much detail that I sound like I'm asking for something I don't even understand. I understand the security concerns, and mojang has every right to keep their website clean of potentially dangerous links, but that doesn't mean I'm happy that I spent several hours writing this post only to discover that I'm not allowed to link it to my feedback. If you are a mojang employee, it's a miracle you found this place.
