Minecraft Crafter Explained: Auto Crafting, Toggle Slots, & More

The Crafter is a game-changing addition to Minecraft, revealed at Minecraft Live 2023, alongside new blocks in version 1.21. This automated crafting block promises to revolutionize how players create items within the game. While we wait for 1.21 to arrive, let’s go over what the Crafter Block is and how it holds the potential to change Minecraft.

What is Minecraft Crafter & How it Works

The Minecraft Crafter is a new block introduced in Minecraft 1.21 that automates crafting. It has a user interface similar to a crafting bench. 

To craft items with the Crafter, you need to power it with Redstone. Once powered, it will take the items placed in its crafting grid and automatically craft the intended item. 

This game-changing block also interacts with other Redstone contraptions. Hoppers and droppers can feed items into the Crafter, offering endless possibilities. Additionally, the UI of the Crafter is customizable, allowing you to toggle specific slots on or off.

Toggling Slots in the Minecraft Crafter

The Crafter’s UI is customizable, so you can toggle specific slots. This gives you a lot of control over the crafting process. You can feed multiple items to the Crafter and configure it to spit out different recipes.

This means you don’t need more than one Crafter to cook up different items. For example, if you want to craft oak wood but don’t want the regular wood, you can turn off specific slots to achieve your desired output.

Using Hoppers and Droppers with the Crafter Block

One of the Crafter’s fascinating properties is that hoppers can extract items from it. With clever Redstone setups, you can filter specific items out of the Crafter, offering precise item management.

Imagine a scenario where you power a Redstone circuit, and then the Crafter and items flow in from hoppers in the right order. This could help you create various recipes with a single Crafter.

The Crafter has the potential to automate various farming processes, such as turning kelp into dried kelp blocks, bones into bone meal, and more. This promises to simplify resource collection and item creation in the game.

Best Uses for the Crafter Block

While I’m sure the wittier Minecraft players will come up with many uses for the Crafter Block as soon as the 1.2 update lands, the community is mostly excited about combining farms and crafting dispensers automatically.

Combo farms are a way to have farms interact to craft complex recipes, which is now possible thanks to the Crafter Block. Combining farms is efficient; for example, connecting an iron farm, a wood farm, and a cobblestone generator opens up new possibilities. 

Dispenser crafting, on the other hand, gets much faster and easier. Dispensers are a pain to craft individually, but you can automate the process with the Crafter. Imagine having a setup where individual components are fed in the correct order and crafted into dispensers efficiently.