Category Passives

Category Passives

Four categories unlock a passive: a permanent bonus for one kind of gear. Passives reward players who commit to a category, and they make cheaper gear worth wearing.

Category	Passive	What it does
Survivalism	Leather Mastery	Full leather armor protects a bit better than iron, and wears out half as fast
Blacksmithing	Chainmail Mastery	Full chainmail protects a bit better than diamond (but less than netherite), and wears out half as fast
Metallurgy	Copper Mastery	Full copper armor protects as well as iron, and wears out half as fast
Botany	Wooden Mastery	Wooden tools mine 50% faster and wear out half as fast

Melee Combat and Ranged Combat have no passive.

Unlocking a passive

A passive is active only while both of these are true:

1. Its category is your Primary or Secondary Specialization.
2. The levels of the category's skills add up to at least 25.

For example, Taming 10 + Fishing 15 unlocks Leather Mastery for a Survivalism specialist. The skills don't need to be leveled evenly.

You'll get a message when a level-up brings your category to 25. /rpgstats shows each passive under its category, either with its effect or with how many more levels it needs. The Specialization menu shows it on each category's label too.

Abandoning a category turns its passive off. Abandoning usually drops the category well below 25 combined levels, so you'd have to earn it again.

Armor masteries

Full set	Normal armor / toughness	With mastery
Leather	7 / 0	16 / 2
Copper	10 / 0	15 / 0
Chainmail	12 / 0	20 / 9

For comparison, iron is 15 / 0, diamond 20 / 8 and netherite 20 / 12.

• Each piece counts on its own. Every mastered piece gives a quarter of the full-set bonus, so you can mix sets: a mastered leather chestplate with iron everything else still gets that chestplate's share.
• It works like real armor. The bonus reduces damage exactly as extra armor points and toughness would, so it helps against attacks, arrows and explosions, but not against falls, drowning, starving, poison or other damage armor never blocks. Protection enchantments, Resistance and absorption still stack on top.
• Your armor bar doesn't show the bonus. mcRPG shrinks each hit before your armor sees it, so the numbers work out the same without changing your stats.

Damage taken through a full, unenchanted set:

Full set	3-damage hit	6-damage hit	10-damage hit	20-damage hit
Leather	2.34	5.04	9.20	18.88
Copper	1.98	4.32	8.00	18.40
Chainmail	1.74	3.84	7.20	18.08
Iron	1.38	3.12	6.00	16.00
Copper + Mastery	1.38	3.12	6.00	16.00
Leather + Mastery	1.22	2.74	5.20	13.60
Diamond	0.69	1.56	3.00	8.00
Chainmail + Mastery	0.68	1.54	2.94	7.76
Netherite	0.67	1.49	2.80	7.20

Copper armor only exists on Minecraft 1.21.9 and later.

Wooden Mastery

While you hold a wooden pickaxe, axe, shovel, hoe, sword or spear:

• You break blocks 50% faster. A wooden pickaxe is still slower than a stone one, but wooden tools become a lot more useful early on.
• The tool wears out half as fast.

Durability

Every mastery halves wear on average: each point of durability damage has a 50% chance to be ignored, on top of Unbreaking. Wear that's ignored doesn't count toward Salvage XP.

Settings

Server owners can change the 25-level requirement, the armor and toughness bonuses, the mining speed bonus and the durability reduction under Specialization.Passives in config.yml, or turn passives off entirely. See Server Setup.