New Tool Type "Alloy Tools"

I remember a developer saying once that they want to make the armor/tool tiers more like a tree with different paths to take, each having their own tradeoffs. Alloys could be a great start. Alloy is a combination of gold and copper where you would upgrade your gold items in a smithing table with a copper ingot.

This tool type would be like gold in the sense that it is faster, most items can be broken by gold faster than it can be broken by diamond or netherite, and with haste/efficiency it could be a method to instamine deepslate. It would also be able to drop the same blocks as iron, making it more practical to use since gold can't drop most ores or blocks of materials. It would have the same durability as iron.

I see alloy as a better tool than iron and a practical contender against diamond but it could be at the same tier as iron by giving it a durability greater than gold but less than iron. Diamond would also still be better than alloy by having a greater durability and being able to obtain obsidian and netherite tier blocks. This feature would add another use to the smithing table and could also be a necessity to a late game player to have in their arsenal because of its faster mining capabilities. Combined with unbreaking 3 you could use this tool up to 1000+ times before it breaks.