StickBack

Get your sticks back. 

The Salvage Bench

Craft it from 4 sticks + 1 stone slab + 1 iron nugget. 

• Sticks come back scaled by the item's remaining durability.
• Materials come back as quarter-unit scrap: Iron Scrap, Gold Scrap, Diamond Fragment, and Netherite Fleck. Four scrap craft back into one vanilla ingot/diamond.
• Netherite gear returns Diamond Fragments and Netherite Flecks.

Early game, you finally get value out of the wooden-and-stone junk phase. Late game, you stop throwing away diamond gear.

Stick armor & the Driftwood set bonus

Craftable from sticks alone, in the standard armor shapes.

Total defense 6 — just under leather, but it costs only sticks.

Driftwood (full-set bonus): wood floats, so you do. Wear all four pieces in water and as long as you're not sneaking gentle buoyancy holds you at the surface and eases your swim speed toward a Depth-Strider-III-like ceiling.