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The UESP Wiki says that magical items have a "health" which (usually) decreases as you use them:

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Mag ... ical_Items

Right, so all items have a Durability, which is their "health" and is whittled down as you use the item. For magical items, this simply ties into that: each use degrades the item a bit and eventually it breaks and is destroyed.

What about repair? Is it possible to repair (recharge?) magical gear, or do you just have to replace it entirely once it breaks?

It is worth noting that different items have different levels durability. Rings, gems and amulets have a lot of points, so after enchanting them (which takes up a good chunk of those away) there's a lot left for multiple uses.

I'm not sure how pre-generated enchanted items work though in this respect, because they are often of the sort that has comparatively few points, like clothing, shoes or weapons. Clothes with a fortify attribute spell on them seem to get wasted pretty fast, low-material (e.g. Elven, Dwarven) weapons with a "cast on strike" spell also get degraded fairly quickly.


Normally you're not supposed to repair enchanted items in any way, but Bethesda included this as a cheat option after a certain patch. You should set magicrepair 1 in Z.CFG for this to work, then if you have an enchanted item with a "repairs items" ability then it should slowly fix your other magic items that you have in the inventory while you rest.

There's some in-depth detail about enchanting in the Wiki:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Enchanting_Items

Thank you. Arena and most(?) TES games after Daggerfall let you repair enchanted items, so I was a little surprised that it can't be done "legally" in Daggerfall. I'd rather avoid using any cheats if I can-- and that goes for tricks you can exploit to break the game. Early on, I found a piece of clothing that gave me Orc Strength, but it broke after a relatively short time. I was using a Mithril Dai-Katana that I'd found as my weapon, but then I was awarded an Orcish Dai-Katana enchanted with Orc Strength for completing a Mages Guild quest and started using that-- but then discovered that I accidentally sold my Mithril Dai-Katana, which had been the best weapon I'd found before being awarded the Orcish Dai-Katana. Now I'm keeping my eye out for another Mithril Dai-Katana or something of higher quality for when my Orcish Dai-Katana eventually breaks.