Crafting

Crafting is the way in which blocks and items are made in Minetest. To craft something, the player must move items into a crafting grid and then arrange the items into a defined pattern.

Many additional player created recipies and other crafting grids are available through mods.

Crafting basics

This section explains the basics of crafting in a very general way. The rules explained here are true for basicly all mods.

Crafting grid and output slot

To be able to craft anything at all, you need a crafting grid. A crafting grid consists of a number of inventory slots and you can place and move and remove items from it like you can with an inventory. To craft, the items have to be arranged somehow in the crafting grid (see “Input and output”). Next to a crafting grid there is one output slot, in which the craft appears if you arranged the items in a valid way. Click on this symbol with the left mouse button to make this craft once. The needed items in the crafting grid will be used up. Click on the output slot with the middle mouse button to make this craft up to ten times (depending on how much items are left in the crafting grid). Crafting generally takes no time and you can use the resulting items immediately.

Crafting grids generally work like inventories. So a crafting grid found in your inventory can be used/abused as an extension of the normal inventory.

You can’t place items on an output slot, however. You can only take items from it.

The player’s built-in 3×3 crafting grid (left). It’s output slot (right).

The vanilla Minetest game has only one crafting grid. It can be accessed through the Inventory and it has a size of 3×3 slots.

Mods and Minetest games may add several crafting grids in various places, not just the inventory. It’s also possible that the inventory has no crafting grid.

Input and output

A crafting recipe consists of at least one input item and exactly one output item. Input items can be either concrete items (for example, Wooden Planks) or an item that is member of a group (for example, the wood group, a group where Wooden Planks and Junglewood Planks are members). If a recipe has multiple slots which require the same group, this does not mean that you have to place the same item in all of these slots. For example, a Chest can be crafted from 8 wood group items arranged in a 3×3 square. This means it can be crafted by using 8 wooden planks or 8 junglewood planks or 4 wooden planks and 4 junglewood planks or any other combination of wooden items, even if these come from mods.

The vanilla Minetest game and other games and many mods make extensive use of the group system, understanding it is crucial to craft efficiently.

Using up the items

Normally, crafting one item removes exactly one item of each slot in the crafting grid.

A crafting recipe may also replace a item with an item instead. This is currently rarely used in mods. In the vanilla Minetest game, using Lava Bucket as furnace fuel does not use up the item, instead it leaves an Empty Bucket in the fuel slot.

Shaped and shapeless recipes

There are are two kinds of crafting recipes, shaped ones and shapeless ones.

For a shaped recipe, the items have to be arranged into an exact pattern. This wiki documents these patterns of the vanilla Minetest game. If a crafting recipe takes up a smaller rectangle than the crafting grid, it can be moved on any part of the crafting grid. For example, a 2×2 recipe can be arranged on the top left, top right, bottom left or bottom right on a 3×3 crafting grid. If a crafting recipe uses more space than available in the crafting grid, you are unable to craft this item with it. You need a larger one.

For a shapeless recipe, the neccessary items just have to be placed on any available slots of the crafting grid. Stacking items does not work, however.

Most crafting recipes of the vanilla Minetest game are shaped recipes. If not noted otherwise, it is assumed that a crafting recipe is shaped. The shapeless recipes of the vanilla Minetest game produce bronze ingots, wool, flour and dyes, respectively.

Activities similar to crafting

Smelting and repairing are just a slightly different form of crafting, most rules described here apply, too. For smelting, the crafting grid is simply just 1×1. A repairing recipe is always shapeless recipe consisting of two tools of the same kind.

Example recipes

In this section you will be shown some example crafts in the vanilla Minetest game. The recipes here are neccessarily incomplete. For more complete crafting recipes, refer to the respective item pages.

Basic Recipes

Name

Ingredients

Input → Output

Description

Wooden Planks

Tree

4

One of the most basic building materials, can be crafted into many things.

Stick

Wooden Planks

4

Used in crafting torches, signs, ladders, fences and as handles for tools and weapons.

Torch

Stick + Coal Lump

4

Used to create light. Torches can be placed on any wall, floor or ceiling.

Furnace

Cobblestone

Allows the player to smelt various items.

Chest

Wooden Planks

Used to store blocks and items inside.

Locked Chest

Wooden Planks + Steel Ingot

The same as a regular chest, except it can only be accessed by the player that placed it.

Tool Recipes

Crafting tools

Name

Ingredients

Input → Output

Description

Pickaxe

Wooden Planks
or Cobblestone
or Steel Ingots
or Mese Crystals
+ Sticks

Required to mine stone-based blocks.

Axe

Wooden Planks
or Cobblestone
or Steel Ingots
+ Sticks

Used to cut wood-based blocks quicker than by hand.

Shovel

Wooden Planks
or Cobblestone
or Steel Ingots
+ Sticks

Used to dig Dirt, Sand, Grass Blocks and many other blocks quicker than by hand.

Hoe

Wooden Planks
or Cobblestone
or Steel Ingots
or Bronze Ingots
+ Sticks

Used to cultivate.

Sword

Wooden Planks
or Cobblestone
or Steel Ingots
+ Sticks

Used to deal more damage to mobs and players than by hand.

Bucket

Steel Ingots

Used to hold and transport water and lava.

Repairing tools

The game has a repairing recipe. It is a shapeless recipe that consists of any two tools of the same kind (and material, of course). It outputs a new tool which is 2% less worn off.