ChestBeacon

ChestBeacon

Find your items. Find the right chest.

ChestBeacon remembers the containers you open and helps you find, collect and organize your items. Search recorded storage, follow an arrow to the right chest and see matching slots highlighted when you open it.

Version 0.2.0 · Fabric, NeoForge and Forge · Client-side

Features

• Search by item name, mod, tag, enchantment, custom name or storage group.
• Follow direction and distance indicators and world highlights to matching containers.
• Press G to search for your held or hovered item, or H for storage suggestions.
• Create project material lists and suggested gathering routes.
• Find scattered items and see a cyan consolidation destination.
• Compare recipe ingredients with inventory and recorded storage, locate materials and add requirements to projects.
• Manage aliases, favorites, groups, rules, thresholds and observed changes.
• Select a scan area from the menu or with leather to find containers you still need to open.

Versions and installation

1. Choose the file matching your exact Minecraft version and loader.
2. Fabric users must install Fabric API for that version. For Minecraft 26.3, use Fabric API 0.163.0+26.3 or later. Forge and NeoForge do not need Fabric API.
3. Place one matching ChestBeacon JAR in your instance's mods folder. Remove older ChestBeacon JARs when updating; your recorded data is retained.
4. Start the game, join a world and press Y. No server installation is needed.

Your first five minutes

1. Open and close a few chests or barrels to record their contents.
2. Press Y, choose Search and type an item name, such as diamond.
3. Select the item, then a storage location.
4. Close the screen and follow the direction and distance indicator.
5. Open the container: matching slots are highlighted in green.

Search examples: @minecraft (mod), #logs (tag), ench:sharpness (enchantment), name:spare (custom name). Combine terms to narrow results.

Controls

Change bindings under Options → Controls → Key Binds → ChestBeacon. You can also bind Clear target and highlight and Toggle project HUD.

Understanding highlights

• Yellow: target storage or storage containing the selected item.
• Cyan: suggested destination for consolidating scattered items.
• Dim orange: an old storage record that should be checked again.
• Green slots: matching items inside an opened container.
• White area box: the selected scan area across the world's full height.

Clear frames through Upkeep → Organize → Clear highlight, the Recipes clear button or your configured clear key. Frames require a loaded chunk, the same dimension and a location within highlight distance. They do not show through walls.

Projects, rules, recipes and scanning

Projects: add items and required counts for a build, then use the route view to visit suggested storages. This is a gathering aid, not automatic pathfinding.

Rules: assign storages to a group and give it an item filter such as #minecraft:logs. This helps H suggest suitable storage and lets Organize flag misplaced items. It never moves items.

Recipes: choose a recipe, inspect ingredients and inventory counts, then use Show in storages or add requirements to a project. Green inventory highlights belong to ChestBeacon's Recipes panel. On Minecraft 1.21.4 and later, multiplayer recipe lists contain only unlocked recipes.

Scan: choose corners in the menu, or enable leather selection and right-click blocks while holding leather. Turn leather selection off when finished. Scanning identifies containers to visit; it does not reveal their contents.

Languages

The interface follows Minecraft's language. Includes English, Turkish, German, French, Spanish (Spain and Mexico), Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Unsupported languages fall back to English. The 14 additional translations were AI-assisted and have not been reviewed by native speakers. Gallery screenshots show actual gameplay with the Turkish interface.

What to expect

ChestBeacon remembers last-known contents. It cannot inspect unopened containers, transfer items or open chests for you. If another player or a hopper changes a chest, reopen it to update the record. Ender Chest contents are account-specific and have no stored world location to frame. Worlds and servers use separate profiles.

Version 0.2.0 fixes unresponsive list entries and custom buttons on recent Minecraft versions, including changed mouse button identifiers in 26.3. Gameplay testing remains partial across the 17 targets; successful builds and startup checks do not guarantee every in-world feature. Local 26.3 testing encountered intermittent native JVM crashes, including without ChestBeacon; the underlying cause remains undetermined.

When reporting a problem, include the mod, Minecraft and loader versions, what you did and what happened. Remove private information from logs before sharing. A GitHub project page will be added later.

Credits and license

Created for Ekrem's ChestBeacon project with substantial assistance from Anthropic Claude and OpenAI Codex. Most code, documentation and additional translations were produced with AI coding tools; the author directed the features and performed partial gameplay testing.

All Rights Reserved. You may download and use official binary releases to play Minecraft. Source code is not public. See the license included in the JAR.

Not an official Minecraft product. Not approved by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft.

Project branding icon: AI-generated with OpenAI image generation. The icon is illustrative branding, not a gameplay screenshot.