Durability

Item durability is a property to which certain crafted items, including all tools, weapons and armor, as well as certain other usable items, are subject. It represents the number of useful actions an item can perform and depletes upon item use. For tools and weapons, item durability represents the number of available uses before the tool is destroyed. For armor, it represents the amount of damage that can be absorbed before the armor is destroyed.

The remaining durability of any item can be seen by looking at the item's durability bar on the bottom of the item icon in the inventory and action bar. An item that has not once been used will not display a durability bar. As the item's durability decreases, the bar shortens right to left, changing colour from green to red. When the item has only small number of uses left the durability bar is an empty grey line.

Armor durability
Armor durability is based on the armor's type (head, torso, legs, feet) and material (leather, gold, iron, diamond). Any time you take damage, each piece of armor you are wearing loses durability equal to the number of half-hearts of the base damage.

Armor durability only decreases when its wearer takes damage that the armor is capable of reducing. This includes:
 * Direct attacks from mobs and other players
 * Getting hit with an arrow or fireball (either Ghast or Blaze)
 * Touching a block of fire, lava, or cactus
 * Explosions

The following types of damage are not reduced by armor and have no effect on the armor's durability:
 * Ongoing damage from being on fire
 * Suffocating inside a block
 * Drowning in water
 * Starvation
 * Fall damage
 * Falling into the Void
 * Poisoning e.g. from a Cave Spider bite or a Potion of Poison
 * Instant damage from a Potion of Harm

Durability tables
Below are listed the numbers of uses for each tool and armor type. Armor values represent the number of half-hearts of raw damage it can sustain, and tool values stand for how many blocks a tool can break or hits a sword can land.

Flint and Steel has a durability of 65, Fishing Rods have a durability of 65* and Shears have a durability of 239.

* Sucessfully fishing a fish counts as one use, reeling the fishing rod while it is stuck to a wall/floor/ceiling counts as two uses, reeling any mob counts as three uses.

Empty

 * This table denotes how many uses remain in a tool the moment its durability bar appears empty.

History
Prior to Beta 1.2 (single player) and 1.0 (multiplayer), when a tool broke, the game considered the last block broken as if it had been done with your hands, often not causing a drop.



Before 1.9 Prerelease 1, all armor materials offered the same base number of armor points, and the effective armor points of a character were equal to the sum of the base armor point values, times the sum of the current durabilities, divided by the sum of the base durabilities. This led to some interesting cases where a single, baldy damaged piece could reduce total armor points or a single, high-quality piece of armor could be greatly augmented with a set of low-quality, low-tier armor.