Armor

Armor adds extra protection via a separate health bar that reaches 10 armor points.

Player armor


Since Indev, helmets, chestplates, leggings, and boots can be crafted by players out of leather, gold, iron, or diamond (in order of increasing durability). This armor prevents part of the damage dealt to the player, including falling, drowning and fire based damage.

Every time the player takes damage the armor loses durability, and its protective capabilities quickly diminish as it loses durability. See Item Durability for more explanation of how armor's durability affects its protective abilities. Materials such as diamond makes a strong armor that withstands quite a bit of punishment, while leather armor barely survives 20 hits.

Chainmail armor can also be hacked into the game, or crafted with edited-in fire blocks. It has the same durability as gold armor, but you do not lose ANY health until all armor points run out.

Before version 1.0.8, cloth was used instead of leather as the lowest tier of armor in Alpha. They changed this because cloth was too easy to get, because sheep are much easier to find than cows. Plus, you don't have to kill sheep to get their material. You have to kill cows to get their material, which, by hand takes about 10 hits, and about 3 with a simple stone sword. you only have to hit sheep 2 times by hand and once with any material sword to get their material. Optionally, you can kill sheep along with shaving off their fur, but it just wastes time. You get nothing out of it. It's useless but if you want to go ahead and be evil, that's fine with all the folks over here at Minecraft.

Armor crafting
It takes 24 units of material to make a full set of armor. Although it is not required to all be the same material, it has to be the same material for one piece (you can't use leather and diamond together, for example.)

Mob armor
In Survival Test, certain Zombies could be found wearing armor; a chestplate and/or a helmet. This armor does nothing; it was just added for cosmetics and possibly a feature that had not been implemented then. Although, Zombies could wear a chestplate or a helmet. It was possible, (but not likely) that a zombie could wear both a chestplate AND a helmet at the same time. It is ALSO possible (but also not likely) that a skeleton could be found wearing this armor. There is probably less than a 2% chance that a skeleton was ever found wearing both helmet and chestplate together. It was so rare to see a skeleton wearing armor, that in the gallery below, there are no pictures of it.

Trivia

 * The names for Iron, Gold and Diamond armour is different to Leather names (With Iron gold and Diamond they are called Helmets and Chestplates, with Leather they are called Caps and Tunics.

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