That's my sign, its attached to you since it has your tag. It's on a situation room, roughly showing the config of the spawn area (like a map). If you head to that base you will get it (hopefully ;) )
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I died and my stuff is on the ground but none of it can be picked up.
I logged in twice and got lag followed by java crash errors within about 2 minutes each time. Between that and the other stuff people are mentioning here, I think I'll just wait til tomorrow's round of bugfixes before trying again.
I find it hard to enjoy building anymore with the tool life bug fixed. I'm not sure how anyone can think mining for tool stock is fun.
[whine]
Without creativity, what is the drive to collect things from below the ground? I will still need to mine epic amounts of stone, but with stone picks, or iron picks, or diamond picks, I'll spend more time on tool crafting than mining. Doesn't make me want to finish my city at all. Yes, the tool bug was just that, a bug, but it was a GOOD bug.
[/whine]
In reality though, at least from my perspective, half of the fun was showing your friends what you made, or better yet, helping them build something they have a vision for.
Maybe if enough people complain it will get unfixed.
At least stone tools are basically free: you can replant trees for more wood, and there's always an excess of cobblestone around. Slow and short-lived, but easy to make. Just carry around a stack of wood, a stack of cobblestone, and a workbench from now on, until tool health gets re-broken. :p
I feel like if our diamond tools break now, that's gonna be it though. :( I haven't found a diamond in weeks. :o
Creative server is still around. Admins spawning items is allowed over there so feel free to request some diamonds to make tools.
I wish iron tools lasted a little longer, but outside of that I don't really have a problem with tools breaking. Tool management and such is just a part of the game, particularly when playing survival.
Tool management really has nothing to do with survival. You can make a ton of tools very easily. The issue is the time it takes away from actually doing fun things.
I'd like to see them implement a server command to change tool life. Until then I guess I'm stuck with iron tools because I'll burn through diamond ones far too quickly to warrant spending the few I have on one.
I meant survival as in the general game type, not as in simply not running out of hit points. It's about building, yes, but it's also about needing to provide for yourself.
You can find iron in the first hour of gametime; you could literally find it in the first 5 or 10 minutes if you're lucky, and iron is all you actually need to do pretty much anything. Even if a wood pick never wore down, for example, you still couldn't mine diamond with it. It would take something away from the game IMO if tools were endlessly renewable and you could make all the tools you need for the entire infinitely long rest of the game in the first hour or two of playtime.
Tools wearing down is pretty much just like running out of torches. You need more light at some point and so you go and find coal, just like you will need new tools at some point so you go and find iron/diamond. Having to find coal takes away from fun things, too. For that matter, having to go dig out huge mines to get cobblestone isn't amazing fun, either, and more time spent doing that is less time spent building as well.
In the end, just remember that all along this game has been in alpha, and only just now barely reached beta. There has been a lot of leeway on a lot of things that is going to go away as the game gets more polished (like health originally not working in MP allowing us to jump off huge buildings with no penalty, for instance). Be ready for a lot more changes as time goes on. I'm sure more options will eventually be put in to allow the game to become more of a sandbox like you want, but for now it is what it is.