Recipes

With the update to Minecraft 1.12, Mojang introduced a new data-driven recipe system based on JSON files. Since then, it has been adopted by Forge and expanded in Minecraft 1.13 into datapacks.

Loading Recipes

Forge will load all recipes which can be found within the ./data/<modid>/recipes/ folder. You can call these files whatever you want, though the vanilla convention is to name them after the output item. For multiple recipes from different sources (Smelting, Crafting, etc), one vanilla convention is to use item_name_from_smelting.json. This name is also used as the registration key, but it does not affect the operation of the recipe.

The Recipe file

A basic recipe file might look like the following example:

{
    "type": "minecraft:crafting_shaped",
    "pattern":
    [
        "xxa",
        "x x",
        "xxx"
    ],
    "key":
    {
        "x":
        {
            "tag": "forge:gems/diamond"
        },
        "a":
        {
            "item": "mymod:myfirstitem"
        }
    },
    "result":
    {
        "item": "mymod:myitem",
        "count": 9
    }
}

Note

When you first obtain an ingredient to a vanilla recipe, it will automatically unlock the recipe in the recipe book. To achieve the same effect, you have to use the advancement system and create a new advancement for each of your ingredients.

The advancement has to exist. This does not mean it has to be visible in the advancement tree.

Type

The type of a recipe is specified via the type field. You can think of this as the definition of which recipe layout to use, for example minecraft:crafting_shaped or minecraft:crafting_shapeless.

Groups

Optionally, you can add a group to your recipes to be displayed within the recipe helper interface. All recipes with the same group string will be shown in the same group. For example, this can be used to have all door recipes shown in the recipe helper interface as a single entry, even though there are different types of doors.

Types of crafting recipes

Within this section, we will take a closer look on the differences between defining a shaped and a shapeless crafting recipe.

Shaped crafting

Shaped recipes require the pattern and key keywords. A pattern defines the slot an item must appear in using placeholder characters. You can choose whatever character you want to be a placeholder for an item. The whitespace character is reserved for an empty slot. Keys, on the other hand, define what items to use for the placeholders. A key is defined by a placeholder character and the item.

Shapeless crafting

A shapeless recipe does not make use of the pattern and key keywords.

To define a shapeless recipe, you have to use the ingredients list. It defines which items have to be used for the crafting process. There are many more of these types which can be used here, and you can even register your own. It is even possible to define a slot that requires more than one of an item, which means multiple of these items have to be in place.

Note

While there is no limit on how many ingredients your recipe requires, the vanilla crafting table only allows 9 items to be placed for each crafting recipe.

The following example shows how an ingredient list looks like within JSON:

    "ingredients": [
        {
            "tag": "forge:gems/diamond"
        },
        {
            "item": "minecraft:nether_star"
        }
    ],
    ...

Results

Every vanilla recipe has to have a result tag to define the output item.

When crafting something, you can get out more than one item. This is achieved by defining the count number. If this is left out, meaning it doesn’t exist within the result block, it defaults to 1. Negative values are not allowed here as an ItemStack cannot be smaller than 0. There is no option to use the count number anywhere else than for the result. Forge also added support for results to include NBT data via the nbt tag.