Different repair materials, that affect the flight capabilities of Elytra

A crazy and maybe slightly overcomplicated but really cool idea I had for Elytra: Different repair materials, that affect the flight capabilities of Elytra

I think Elytra should be repairable with different materials. But I don’t just think that should be it, I think the material should have an effect on how it flies. Elytra should start off being made out of 100% Phantom Membrane, and should fly exactly how they fly now. But, as they get damaged, they should be repairable with other materials like leather, wool, paper, and other stuff like that, in addition to phantom membranes. Something like wood or iron or gold would be too heavy, but light stuff like paper would be good.
By repairing the item with, let’s say paper, it’d make the item AmountOfDamageRepaired% Paper. So if you use up 50% of the durability and repair it with paper, it’d become 50% paper. As the durbabilitg decreases again, let’s say another 50%, and then you repair it with leather, you’d get 25% Membrane, 25% Paper, and 50% Leather.
The material should have an effect on flight, and Elytra should have more statistics to make this work.
Statistic 1: Durability modifier.
2: Height loss speed multiplier.
3: Speed multiplier.
4: Height gain speed multiplier.
Basically, the durability modifier and speed modifier are obvious, BaseDurabilityStat1 and BaseAirSpeedStat3, but the others are more interesting. Stat2 should influence how long you can stay in the air for. At level flight, you will descent at the base rate with 100% Membrane, but other materials can alter it. Stat4 would work in the same way.
Now, the different materials should have different affects on these stats. Leather is heavy, but stronger, and should decrease Stat4 and Stat3, but increase Stat2 and Stat1. Paper is light, but weak, and should increase Stat3 and Stat4, but decrease Stat2 and Stat1. Wool is close to Phantom Membrane, decreasing all stats, but only by a small amount. Phantom Membranes are exactly the same as Elytra are normally.
Basically:
Material | Stat1 | Stat2 | Stat3 | Stat4
Membrane | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1
Leather | 2 | 2 | 0.5 | 0.5
Paper | 0.25 | 0.5 | 1.75 | 2
Wool | 0.75 | 1.25 | 0.75 | 0.85
As you can see, these values would need some tinkering and balancing, but the basic idea is, paper is fast but breaks quickly and would make things harder to control, leather is strong but slow and would make things harder to use due to the increased height loss but the lower speed could make things easier for beginners, wool is worse in all aspects, but is closest to phantom membranes and should be fairly abundant, allowing someone who doesn’t have many phantom membranes to keep flying without too significant of a loss of functionality.
Minecraft would determine the final statistics by averaging out the values for each material in use. I’m sure there’s better of ways of doing this, but the most simple way I could think of is:
MembraneStatValueMembrane% + LeatherStatValueLeather% PaperStatValuePaper% + WoolStatValueWool% = x/100
Effectively, it adds together all of the values multiplied by the percentage of that material, then divides it by 100, creating a mean. This would mean for the example we used early, 25% Membrane + 25% Paper + 50% Leather:
Stat1: 25 + 100 + 6.25 + 0 = 131.25/100 = 1.3125
Stat2: 25 + 100 + 12.5 + 0 = 137.5/100 = 1.375
Stat3: 25 + 25 + 43.75 + 0 = 93.75/100 = 0.9375
Stat4: 25 + 25 + 50 + 0 = 100/100 = 1
That means that the base durability of the Elytra would be multiplied by 1.3125. However, the height loss speed would be multiplied by 1.375, meaning you’d fall out of the sky faster. Additionally, the Elytra would travel at just under the normal speed, and that it would gain height at the same speed as normal.
This is a really cool concept, although it would require a lot of testing and balancing. If someone just wants a normal Elytra, they’d want to use phantom membranes, and if they ran out they’d want to use wool, or maybe mix leather and paper to try and recreate the authentic experience, but if someone wanted to win a race they’d got for the paper plane look, and go for maximum speed at the cost of durability. That’s the beauty of this: not only does it make Elytra more useful and customisable, it allows you to repair your equipment with different materials, making it more accessible, it also doesn’t make it too easy as replicating the normal experience is difficult if not impossible without careful maths and carrying multiple different items to repair in the correct ratios.
Finally, I’m not sure if Mending should always repair with the equivalent of phantom membranes, or with the dominant material, or if it should determine the ratio of each material and maintain that, e.g. for our well-used example, 1:1:2:0. Probably the latter. It’s also be really cool if the textures could change as the material changes, phantom membranes keeping the default colour scheme, paper making it white, leather making it orange-y brown and wool creating a more greyish-white maybe?
So, as I’m sure you can tell, it’s an awesome idea, albeit very complicated. I can see why Mojang wouldn’t want to implement something like this, but in that case it might be cool to see this as a mod.