Every turtle I have made has a pickaxe or no tool. There is very little reason to use anything other than a pickaxe. Swords have a small increase of attack compared to pickaxes and hoes allow for making dirt/grass into farmland. Shovels and (wood) axes have no use as they are covered by the pickaxe.

Basically, I want a reason to use a shovel and wood axe with my turtles.

Ideas:

• turtles using an axe on wood which was part of a tree can get a fuel unit from 'wood shavings'
• shovels are cheaper than pickaxes so I guess that works

Would requiring the "proper" tool be an option? Basically, axe for wood, shovel for dirt/gravel, etc. To prevent from mining underground becoming hard, pickaxes and alike can still break other blocks if they are normally broken without a tool, but add some sort of delay.

Shovels have no use as they are covered by the pickaxe.

Well, you can make paths with shovels, but yes: it is rather shadowed by the pickaxe.

I agree with @KnightMiner's suggestion of penalising inappropriate tools or boosting appropriate ones. I'd quite like it if there was some more control over animations - probably through a speed argument in ITurtleAccess.playAnimation.

There is a tiny bit of me which would like to be able to modify any animation (or action) - probably by having various events and firing it on the Forge event bus. This way you could have upgrades which boost the speed of a turtle for an additional fuel cost, or allow turtles to respond to beacon effects. Anyway, that was very off topic. Sorry.

Turtles getting buffs off beacons sounds cool. Guess I'll make another issue.

@Lupus590 I'm more interested in exposing the functionality to allow those sorts of features than implementing the features themselves. This way you give other peripheral developers the same power and flexibility as the mod itself.

Also, detecting beacons and responding to them requires some rather ugly hacks and I'm not entirely sure how efficient it would be - something which would have to be investigated before jumping in.

I'm planning to make some PRs with exposing some of this stuff (if Dan doesn't object), I just want to give him time to catch up with the current PRs before jumping into a whole new wave of them.

I really need to get myself into the Java side of mods, almost done with uni, almost.

There's already supposed to be some code in place to make tools work as they do for Steve (so axes are needed for sapling collection from leaves, shovels for clay, etc), but testing in 1.79 it doesn't seem to be working correctly for all the relevant block types. The only one that seems to be functioning as it should is snow.