Obviously wouldn't work for wooden or leather, but for iron, gold and diamond tools and armor it would be nice if you were able to smelt them back into ingots/gems somehow. Mainly so the piles of iron stuff you get from zombies aren't totally useless.

This is a great idea! However, I believe it will be too resource demanding. It'll have to calculate your armor level in comparison to an ingot level. What happens when there is a half ingot worth of armor left? You'd have to take halves into consideration with a rounding (probably round down). It'll constant be calculating this on every player wearing armor, I believe. In addition when you do go to smelt it back into iron... the furnace won't really work. It goes by a 1:1 input:output ratio. You can't use a work bench because it'll probably be hard to code with the armor calculation.

MCMMO, when it returns, gives the option of repairing armor and such. This way you can make one set of armor and keep repairing it. Of course, you'd have to start with leather and keep repairing it, then iron. Don't use gold because it's ineffective, lol. Then diamond after iron.

Don't get me wrong. I love this idea, and if it is possible to implement it without having too much resource demand, then I want it in our server. Antoyoo will get so rich from his pvp then, haha.

One thing about this that I dont like. The donator kits for iron/diamond armor would basically be turned into free money kits.

True, didn't think about that.

Me either.

But Dunsjohn, the server wouldn't be calculating all the gear all the time, even if it did take durability into account it would only check when you go to break it down, which it doesn't have to, could just be set to only work with stuff that is at 100% durability. Also, yes, the furnace is suitable this use if it is possible to make a smelt recipe that is 'iron helmet 100% durability smelts into 4x iron ingots'

Actually it wouldn't be that resource heavy. Its an event driven tiny command, only activated when someone actually smelts the equipment, and even then a tiny rudimentary calculation. Halves (rounding) is simple to do and it wouldnt be constantly calculating anything, it only has to do anything when the item is smelted. As far as plugins go if done well this would be one of the least resource hungry. I am fairly sure there is already a number of plugins for this on bukkit.

Maybe disable it for people who have access to the iron/diamond kits... or if the plugin only lets you use perfect durability items, make the kit give items at 99% durability.

My bad, I thought it would tie in with the armor damage during combat (which I believe is constantly calculated).

it wouldnt be hard to make it give less ingots back the more damage its taken, and if you make it just for iron and gold no one is really gonna make a significant amount of money on it with kits.

I strongly agree with your idea that the donator kit items will need to be differentiated from "regular" items for this new plugin to work. However, I disagree that having the kit items at 99% will solve the problem. Donators would be able to spend one diamond for repair and get many diamonds back at the end.

If the kit items were given out as totally different items, this may work. However, I am not sure about the amount of work that would be required to pull this off.

Personally, however, I feel as though this new plugin would create an immediate overflow of diamonds into the economy, which will cause people to go insane about how the economy is breaking down. I am content with the new repair ability, and don't think that this is that much of a necessity.