In an inventory screen, if you have picked up an item with the cursor and you click on a slot which has a different item in it, the two items are exchanged — unless the items differ only in damage/durability!
If such items were always swapped, then it would be much less tedious to swap out damaged tools for new ones.
(If I were to speculate about the cause of the bug, I would think that it is because the items look like candidates for stacking, and stacking does nothing since tools “stack to 1”. But that would be just speculation.)
Linked issues
is duplicated by 2
Comments 8
Definitely an old bug that's been around for a while. Would be very nice to have resolved since I still bump into this bug every now and then.
This bug bothers me to death all the time. I like to sort my inventory from most damaged to least damaged by type of tool by version of tool (as in, ore makeup and kind of tool) and if I accidentally place the wrong tool in a spot I have to do a bunch of nonsense to get them sorted properly. I'm pretty sure the game was just never set up to check the damage value of tools when it is checking to see if you have the same kind of item and you're clicking, so it doesn't think it needs to swap them because they're the same, and it doesn't think it can stack them either, so it just stays in your cursor.
The wiki lists "Fixed being unable to switch tools of the same kind in your inventory." in the changes for the 12w18a weekly build (before 1.3.2), and at the time, I hoped that it meant the issue described in this ticket had been fixed. However, the change list on the Mojang page didn't mention it.
The ability to repair tools by combining them made it so that you'd want to swap tools out before breaking them, and this bug makes that a pain if you want to keep your inventory organized.
I can confirm this, this is a very annoying bug. To swap a new pickaxe with a damaged one, you need to swap it with another item first.