For the tools like the shovels, pickaxes etc perhaps instead of durability being a mechanic for them, the speed of gathering and amount of gathered items could be a thing instead.
So instead of the items breaking, an iron tool would work faster than a copper one and potentially get more resources at a time and so ono for each increasing tier.
This way instead of going through tools that break constantly you have a one off tool you can craft at the blacksmith and you have incentive to want to upgrade to a higher tier since they might mine/gather quicker and potentially yield more resources (either fixed or like 5% chance to five 1/double more or something)