Crafting Refinements

This pack refines and adds various crafting, blasting, and stonecutting recipes to provide a balanced, convenient, and consistent crafting experience.

This should work on the latest version of Minecraft, even though the pack says it's out of date. It's just complaining that I haven't updated the pack number. The actual contents of the datapack are compatible. Please report an issue if it doesn't function in the latest update. Versions before 1.21.9 are no longer supported

This page is under major revision

Why Does This Exist?

While there are many crafting tweak datapacks, none provided a cohesive set of changes that prioritized balance and consistency. This provides an alternative, one-stop shop, for a whole slew of tweaks that aim to make quality-of-life changes while maintaining gameplay balance and the vanilla feel. Additionally, this pack is set up so that all the recipe book entries and recipe toasts work properly (they unlock at the right time and are grouped appropriately) which is lacking in many other packs. Everything should seamlessly integrate into vanilla Minecraft!

General Rules:

There are some general rules that Minecraft recipes generally follow (and which this datapack seeks to remove all exceptions to)

1. Recipes should resemble the final product
2. Similar outputs should have similar recipes (minor differences are allowed for different material types)
3. Crafting results should be proportional to their input (some loss is acceptable, and often expected)
4. Specialized stations (stonecutter, blast furnace, etc.) should have equal or better rates
5. Crafting results should not grant an overabundance of materials
6. A block created with a 3x3 of the same material should be unpackable
7. A block created with a 2x2 of the same material should not be unpackable
8. Brewing recipes should not use full blocks, tools, or armor as ingredients
9. Time is an important resource and should be spent on fun gameplay
10. Impact on inventory clutter should be kept in mind
11. Recipes with the same output should be grouped in the recipe book

What Are the Changes?

Blast Furnace Buff

This allows you to smelt raw gold, copper, and iron blocks in blast furnaces. They give you the same amount of XP you would normally get if you smelted the raw items individually. However, it is slightly more efficient since it takes only eight times as long as a regular item. This makes it quite simple to calculate how much fuel you need! One coal for every raw block!

Additionally, sand and red sand can be smelted into glass using a blast furnace!

Dropper to Dispenser

This works just like the one at Vanilla Tweaks! It allows you to turn droppers into dispensers either by using a bow or with three sticks and three string. What prompted me to make this, however, is that, at the time of creation, Vanilla Tweaks did not properly implement the recipe book and recipe toasts (this might not be the case any longer).

Vanilla Tweaks (VT) is an excellent resource and you can find more such datapacks here: https://vanillatweaks.net/picker/crafting-tweaks/

More Gates

This is a simple part of the datapack that increases the number of fence gates you receive to two. It grants greater freedom to use them for decoration. If this isn't your jam, it also gives you an easier means to avoid the issue of multiple animals getting stuck trying to get through the one-block entrance of your pen.

More Stairs

The crafting recipe in Vanilla Minecraft is an utter ripoff! Six solid blocks should really give you more stairs! While eight stairs are mathematically possible, I opted to take a different route than VT as that just seemed a step too far (pun intended). Instead, stair recipes now grant six stairs!

More Trapdoors

Trapdoors are great decoration blocks as well as useful in various technical builds. So why, pray tell, do six planks condense down into two thin slabs of wood? Again, VT takes the mathematical approach and outputs 12 trapdoors! I find this a bit excessive as well as unrealistic (There is a lot of waste when working with wood!), so I opted for 6 as a result. This helps prevent inventory clutter while still meaning you only need to deforest a third of what you had to before! If you want even better rates, check out the stonecutting tweaks below!

On top of these changes to wooden trapdoors, I also modified the iron trapdoor recipe to match the copper recipe. It now requires six iron but produces two trapdoors. Unfortunately, this conflicts with the iron bars recipe. To fix this, I changed the iron bars recipe to two columns of ingots on either side of the crafting interface. This has the added bonus of actually looking more like prison bars!

Since the advent of the copper age, Mojang tried to resolve this inconsistency; however, I believe they went in the wrong direction. Thus, I made their copper bars recipe match my iron bars recipe below.

More Wood

This is another pack that was inspired by VT and created by myself due to recipe book issues. It increases the amount of Wood and Hyphae you get from Logs and Stems respectively to 4. A simple change, but a welcome one when you're building with symmetry.

Renewable Calcite*

Love that beautiful white wonder but stripped every Geode and Stoney Peaks in render distance? Look no further than this datapack to supply your white marble for all your mausoleum needs! This allows you to turn 4 dead coral blocks into 4 calcite. It even reflects real life as both coral and calcite are made of calcium carbonate! Now you need only destroy your local coral reefs to fuel your legacy-defining monuments! (If only Mojang would complete the Calcite block set)

*Only in participating worlds. Requires Renewable Coral. Additional requirements may apply. We are not responsible for any environmental devastation.

Renewable Coral

Ever wanted to build a coral palace or use these harmless creatures for your personal decor and enjoyment but fear those axe-wielding environmentalists? Never fear! By using this special recipe, you can turn those branching fans and corals into the solid blocks they were meant to be. It only requires 4 of the same color and a little bit of your soul to mash them into their proper shape!

Renewable Tuff

Diorite, andesite, and granite all have crafting recipes, but tuff did not! Now, tuff can be crafted using one andesite and one diorite to make two tuff blocks.

Craftable Cinnabar

In 26.2, Mojang added cinnabar and sulfur, but only made the latter renewable! To combat such discrimination, let me introduce to you a new cinnabar recipe! While not technically renewable, it effectivly is in any normal survival world. It takes inspiration from diorite's recipe. Did you know that, according to Minecraft Education Edition, netherrack has mercury in it? Hence why it is used in the recipe to reflect cinnabar's high mercury content in the real world.

Unpackable Bamboo

This strives to make the storage of bamboo more convenient. A bamboo block can now be crafted back into 9 bamboo just like other storage blocks. However, this overwrites the old recipe for bamboo planks. To get around that, bamboo planks are crafted by placing one bamboo block on top of another as if you were making sticks. This has the happy accident that the recipe now outputs the same number of planks as other plank recipes. This works for stripped bamboo blocks too!

Stonecutter Solutions

I have added a whole slew of additions to the stonecutter recipes. Woodcutting is now a thing! Not only does this let you cut logs into planks, but planks into stairs, slabs, pressure plates, buttons, and trapdoors! On the last three, you'll even get better conversion rates. One plank will give you 2 pressure plates, 4 buttons, or 2 trapdoors. The reason these rates are not applied to the crafting table is to prevent inventory clutter. Now, you can more precisely control the amount of output you get without feeling like you need to clean out your drawers and throw away junk. On the other hand, you can now get more product for the meter-by-meter wooden cube you sacrificed!

Additionally, I added a few more recipes that I thought made life a little easier. If you accidentally mined a bunch of deepslate with your silk touch pickaxe, you can now convert it into cobbled deepslate in the stone cutter! Likewise with stone. (This has been implemented into vanilla in 26.1+!) Copper blocks and their variants can now be cut into three corresponding trapdoors. You no longer need to age them!

Miscellaneous

This adds some miscellaneous recipes that didn't warrant their own separate pack. If you wish to download them separately, VT has most of the changes. Chains and redstone torches now give you four, packed ice and blue ice can be unpacked, and sandstone of both types now give you two instead of one. Honeycomb blocks now take a 3x3, but they can be converted back into 9 honeycomb. Potent sulfur only requires a 2x2 of sulfur blocks. Lastly, nether wart blocks are now crafted with a 2x2 instead of a 3x3 of nether wart, as it should adhere to the above rules, and being able to craft the blocks into nether wart would be game-breaking.

What if I only like some of the changes?

Unfortunately, Modrinth doesn't allow file variations to be hosted on one project page. If you would like a specific category of recipes, you can find them on curseforge. Just go to the files page there and download the files manually and then drop them into your datapack folder. If you wish to make finer adjustments, it is as easy as unzipping the file, deleting the recipe you wish to remove, and then rezipping it.