Got too much loot from adventuring or useless tools from trading? Diamond shards allow for a balanced way to salvage your excess diamond gear.
To start making shards, throw your equipment on a smithing table, then drop an anvil on it! The pressure from the two hard surfaces breaks the items into fragments. You get one fragment per item crushed.
Fragments work just like emeralds, allowing you to trade with villagers. To turn your fragments back into diamonds, you'll need a specialized compression chamber. By that, I mean take a sticky piston and smush your diamond fragments with a quartz slab. It takes exactly 9 shards to make one diamond.
Ultimately, I've found that mining diamonds still goes faster than trading with villagers to make fragments. With needing to replace anvils, I think the cost here is balanced toward late game after you get an iron farm. The mechanics also work nicely with vanilla automation for crushing gear and compressing fragments (redstone machine video coming soon).
Add this pack to your world's datapack folder for functionality. Add this to your resource pack folder for the fragment's to have a custom texture.
