Scale Of Tools
You are three blocks away from finishing a massive mining tunnel when your diamond pickaxe vanishes from your hand with a sad little pop. Everyone who has played Minecraft long enough knows that feeling. Scale Of Tools exists to make sure it never happens again. This lightweight client-side mod keeps an eye on the durability of whatever you are holding and gives you a heads-up before the tool turns to dust.
The name comes from Dutch, where it translates roughly to "scale of tools." Fitting, since the mod essentially weighs and measures your gear so you always know how much life is left in it.
What Scale Of Tools Actually Does
At its core, Scale Of Tools is a durability watchdog. When the tool in your active hand drops below a set threshold, a message appears in your action bar. Something like "Almost broken: Diamond Pickaxe - 10 remaining" flashes on screen, giving you just enough warning to swap tools, repair at an anvil, or head back to your base.
Both hands are monitored, so a shield or offhand tool will not slip past your notice either. The mod also handles edge cases intelligently: tools with effectively infinite durability, such as fully enchanted netherite gear, are ignored entirely, so you will not get pointless warnings about items that never break.
Notification Spam Prevention
Nobody wants a chat window flooded with warnings while strip mining for two hours. Scale Of Tools repeats notifications no more than once every three seconds by default, and that interval is fully configurable. Dig in peace, and let the mod speak up only when it matters.
Supported Versions and Loader
Scale Of Tools is built for Fabric and currently ships for Minecraft 1.20.1 and 1.21.4. The 1.20.1 build runs on Java 17, while the 1.21.4 build requires Java 21. One important detail: the Fabric API is not required. Fabric Loader alone is enough to get everything running.
Because the mod is entirely client-side, you can join any vanilla server without asking the admin to install anything. No server-side component, no permissions to negotiate, no risk of getting flagged for suspicious behavior. It is pure quality-of-life convenience, not a cheat.
How to Install Scale Of Tools
Getting started takes about two minutes. Here is the process:
- Install Fabric Loader for your Minecraft version from the official Fabric website.
- Download Scale Of Tools for Minecraft matching your game version (1.20.1 or 1.21.4).
- Drop the .jar file into your .minecraft/mods folder.
- Launch the game. Warnings are active immediately with no extra setup.
If you prefer a smoother route, the foxygame.net launcher bundles Scale Of Tools directly in its add-on catalog, so you can enable it with a single click and let the launcher handle version matching and updates automatically. That saves you from manually hunting down the correct jar every time Minecraft pushes a patch.
Configuration and Settings
After your first launch, a config file appears at config/scaleoftools.json. Three parameters control the behavior:
- durabilityWarn – turns warnings on or off (default: true).
- durabilityThreshold – the remaining durability that triggers a warning (default: 10).
- durabilityWarnInterval – how often notifications repeat, measured in ticks (default: 60, which equals three seconds).
Want warnings at 25 durability instead of 10? Change one number. Want them every five seconds? Adjust the interval. The file is plain JSON, so editing it is trivial even if you have never touched a config before.
Under the Hood
Technically, the mod uses a single MinecraftClientMixin that runs each tick alongside a small ScaleOfToolsEngine. It does not touch world data, does not alter saves, and can be removed at any time without leaving residue behind. That makes it safe for long-term worlds and easy to test on a whim.
Why It Belongs in Your Mod Folder
Scale Of Tools is free, distributed under the MIT license, and can be included in modpacks with attribution. It solves one small, annoying problem so cleanly that you will forget it is even installed, right up until the moment it saves your favorite pickaxe. For players who value their enchanted gear and their time, this is an easy addition to any Fabric setup.