A great way to improve efficiency on your server is to provide iron tools to every player. Here is a simple design to help you make this fast... so you can get back to mining.
Making iron early in the game in Eco is a lengthy business that also requires management of tailings. This means iron has value and you can use it to trade for quality food, furniture and other items. But unless other players are planning to pick mechanics, they have no big interest in plain iron bars. Tools are a great way to make iron interesting early in the game and it was the most important source of trade for the mining/smelting skill before nails came into play in Eco 9.0. So basically, tools are a source of income.
On the community side, calorie usage and length of use is improved with iron tools compare to the basic stone and wood ones. Providing your community with these tools greatly improve overall efficiency and wealth of your server. Also, cooking recipes require more ingredients per calories compared to campfire (and slow to make) and the transition is better when active players are able to get their hands on iron tools. The same approach applies to steel and modern tools later.
Iron tools are made by players with the smelting skill, while steel and modern tools are made with the advanced smelting skill. Once tools are sold, people are happy for a while until the tools break.
Ideally, broken tools should return to the smelting specialists for repair, since they use less iron or steel than unskilled players. In some versions of Eco, you cannot even repair them.
You might try to catch smelters when they are online, but they will have to quit their job in the mines to come upstairs (and charge you for it). Some smelters make public chests and you drop your tools there, unsure about when you will have new tools and at what price. Smelter may just run out of iron and there will be delays. These are new players or small team tactics for tool repair that are unsuitable for bigger servers.
This is why a community needs a place to drop broken tools and buy new ones immediately. Hence, the tool repair shop.
I will discuss few strategies here but I am pretty sure there are a lot of others to try : it's the beauty of Eco.
A common design is to sell new tools and buy broken ones at your main store. You first begin to sell new tools at the market price (ex. 22.5 credits). Then, the price of broken tools is the market price minus the value of iron bars needed for repair (22.5 - 16.5 = 6 credits). Most people will reduce the price even more as an extra fee because it takes few seconds to pick and repair tools. Here is an example of such store :
This design will get you far but it has some flaws. First, you have to keep calculating the price of new and broken tools each time the price of iron changes (or "forget" and take advantage of your collaborators). Second, there are management issues, for example tools get mixed up in containers and you may have an iron shortage when it's time to repair them. I also saw many cases of iron tool dumping just before steel tools became available. You may limit the number of tools in the buy section to avoid this, but this leads to other problems when you have many customers.
So here is a design which requires a separate store linked to it's own chests (2 or 3) and stockpile (small one). The storage items are also linked to a tool bench. Chests are first in the list of linked containers, so the used tools end up there and the stockpile is free for the iron. The result is a clear infrastructure where you always have material to repair and you easily find all your tools.
The store itself is set to no currency (bartering), so the whole contraction doesn't mess with your main store. Players must make an exchange or donate excess value: dumping of old iron tools to get more currency is not possible anymore.
In the meantime, you main store sells iron and new tools. This way you know exactly when to make new tools and your main store is easier to manage.
If you continue to advanced smelting, you might want to do the same with steel tools. Sadly, a very common problem at this stage is economic inequity and some players just cannot afford the steel version yet. If you switch to steel, they must find another place to repair their iron tools or revert back to stone tools. You don't want to be the player who bring back your neighbors to stone age : there will be more grinding, they will leave and you'll be closer to server failure. Iron tools are also interesting to keep during the transition to steel tools or when you main steel tool is broken and you are far from home.
Adding steel tools to your store is easy, but you want to avoid people dropping broken iron tools to get steel tools in exchange. So your store could buy broken steel tools for 0.1 credits. Since broken iron tools are worth 0.01 credits right now, it's unlikely someone has 10 iron tools to trade and "fake" a broken steel tool in the barter system. Plus steel tools are worth less than 10 times the value of iron tools, so they would do this at a loss. For the price of steel, there is a maximum of 2 iron bars in the recipe, so you could make the price of each steel bar at 4 credits. Note that steel is not 4 times the price of iron : we are in a barter store and what really matter here is the relative amount of items involved in the trade we want to see. And what we want to see is a single stockpile with enough steel to repair all the tools quickly. Setting steel high serves only to discourage people from dropping iron instead. If they do, the extra iron will compensate the time loss in managing the store. Then, calculate the amount of steel unit you need to repair a tool and add the price of the broken steel tool. So if you need 4 steel to repair, the price of a repaired steel tool could be 16.1, the price of steel 4 and the price of an old tool 0.1. Again, sell new steel tools and steel bars at your main store.
As an alternative, you can allow people to drop iron to repair the steel tools. However, you'll need to adjust the price of steel and iron at your repair shop each time one of them changes (or accept only iron) and spend a bit more time managing the supplies.
I would like to see pictures of your tool repair shop if you are not to busy mining.
Take care and have a nice game !
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