Ever felt like you're spending more time juggling inventory than actually adventuring in Minecraft? If so, you're going to love the Crafter. This nifty block, a star of the Tricky Trials Update, is all about taking the tedious out of crafting and injecting a serious dose of automation into your world.
Think about it: you're deep in a Trial Chamber, battling Bogged and Breezes, and you suddenly realize you're low on crossbow bolts or axes. Instead of stopping everything to craft them manually, imagine a system that just churns them out for you. That's the magic of the Crafter.
Getting Your Hands on a Crafter
Crafting a Crafter itself is a bit of a meta-moment, but thankfully, it's straightforward. You'll need five iron ingots, a crafting table, two pieces of redstone dust, and a dropper. Arrange them in a crafting table just so, and voilà – you've got your very own automation station.
Once you place it down, you'll notice its interface. At the bottom, it's your familiar inventory. Top right is the output slot – where your newly crafted items will appear. And the real star? The top left input slots. This is where the ingredients go.
Beyond the Crafting Table: Automation Station
You can use a Crafter like a regular crafting table, filling the input slots and taking your item. But that's like using a supercomputer to check the weather. The real power comes when you hook it up to redstone.
A Crafter springs to life whenever it receives a redstone pulse. This could be from a button, a lever, a pressure plate – anything that sends a signal. When it gets that pulse, it lights up, takes the items from its input slots, crafts whatever it can, and spits the result out. Ouch, if you're standing too close!
Building Your Auto-Crafting Empire
This is where the fun really begins. By connecting your Crafter to a redstone "clock" – a circuit that sends out regular pulses – you can achieve true automation. One of the simplest ways to build a clock is with a couple of redstone repeaters and dust, activated by a redstone torch.
And the automation opportunities don't stop there. Hoppers are your best friends when it comes to feeding ingredients into the Crafter. This means you can set up systems to process hundreds, even thousands, of items without lifting a finger.
There are a couple of quirks to keep in mind with hoppers. If you place a hopper below a Crafter, it'll try to pull items out of the input slots before they're even crafted. Not ideal! To avoid this, make sure your output hopper is positioned on the side of the Crafter where the items are ejected – the side that looks like it has a little face. This way, your crafted goods flow smoothly into your collection system.
Also, hoppers tend to fill the input slots from left to right. If you're crafting something that requires a specific arrangement of ingredients, you can actually click on the input slots in the Crafter's interface to temporarily disable them from receiving items from a hopper. Click again to re-enable them. It's a small detail, but it can make a big difference for complex recipes.
A Simple Example: Planks Galore
Let's walk through a quick example. Imagine you want an endless supply of wooden planks from logs. First, set up a barrel – this is where your planks will end up. Connect a hopper to the barrel.
Now, place your Crafter on top of that hopper, ensuring its "face" points towards the hopper. Open the Crafter's interface and disable all but one input slot. We only need one for this simple recipe.
Around the back of the Crafter, sneak-place another hopper feeding into the Crafter. Put a second barrel on top of this second hopper. Fill this top barrel with logs. Jump back down and check your Crafter. The enabled input slot should start filling with logs from the hopper above.
All that's left is the redstone pulse. A simple button placed directly on the Crafter will do the trick. Every time you press it, one log will be converted into four planks, which will then be collected in the barrel below. Scale this up with a redstone clock, and you've got yourself a plank-producing powerhouse!