Would you consider making smithing tables allow gliders to be upgraded to the next tier with one single paper piece?

As an example, let's say you have the first and most basic glider:

• Go to a smithing table
• Place the glider and a iron reinforced paper in their individual slots
• Get back an iron reinforced glider

This would make gliders easier to obtain, but I believe that this would be justifiable given how low in durability they are through the early to mid game, and it would also give more use to the smithing table outside of just netherite upgrading.

This is relatively easy to do via datapack. Something like this should work for your example:

{
  "category": "misc",
  "group": "gliders",
  "type": "minecraft:smithing_transform",
  "base": {
    "item": "vc_gliders:paraglider_wood"
  },
  "addition": {
    "item": "vc_gliders:reinforced_paper_iron"
  },
  "result": {
    "item": "vc_gliders:paraglider_iron"
  },
  "template": {
    "item": "vc_gliders:reinforced_paper_iron"
  },
  "show_notification": true
}

Just note that if you're playing <1.20 then you can omit the "addition" part as trims weren't a thing before. And if you're using tags (like all brass ingots would be forge:ingots/brass), replace "item" with "tag." Depending on where you place the datapack, you can either replace a recipe or have this be an alternate recipe. If you want to replace it, follow the structure of where the recipe is located in the jar file. For this example, the datapack should look something like this: [name_of_datapack] \ data \ vc_gliders \ recipes \ paraglider_iron.json

If you want to just add this recipe as an alternative, rename the "vc_gliders" folder to something like "vc_glider_alternatives" so that the normal recipe and smithing recipe are available. You can also use datapacks to remove recipes or items if you deem them "unrealistic," like if you don't want the diamond glider, just use the previous example and have the paraglider_diamond.json file be blank inside.

Once you're done, place the datapack inside your worldsave's "datapacks" folder and type /reload in-game (or just relog) and it should take effect. It'll look like this below:

I will talk to the mods director about this change! It looks good :))

Sorry about the late reply, so many mods

No worries! Just giving a crash course to the OP on datapacks as they're so powerful at tweaking mods to be just how you like it, yet so underutilized/poorly-understood. Thanks for the great work on this mod!