Crafter

Overview

The crafter, added in 1.21, is the first block in Minecraft that can craft automatically, and it changes what a farm can do. It holds a 3x3 grid, and when it receives a redstone pulse it crafts whatever recipe the grid currently forms and pushes the result out of its output face into whatever is in front — a hopper, a chest, a dropper. Ingredients go in through hoppers or droppers from any side, and the crafter distributes incoming items across its slots evenly, filling the emptiest first. The feature that makes it reliable is slot disabling: click any slot in the interface and it is toggled off, so items are never routed there. That is how you pin a recipe's shape — disable the four corners and the crafter can only ever make the plus-shaped recipe you intended, regardless of what order the inputs arrive in. A comparator reads how full the grid is, which lets you gate the pulse until the recipe is complete. Practical uses run from packing a farm's output into blocks for storage, to on-demand crafting of paper, sticks, or dyed blocks, to automatic charcoal-to-torch conversion.

Automatically packing farm output into blocks, mass-producing paper, sticks, torches or dyed items from a hopper feed, and building fully automatic factories that previously needed a player standing at a crafting table.

Crafter counts as a building block in Minecraft 1.21.4. Crafter has a crafting recipe, so it is renewable as long as you can source its ingredients. At a hardness of 1.5 it takes a moment to break but never slows a build down.

Broken correctly, it drops itself. Sixty-four fit in one inventory slot. The recipe calls for Iron Ingot, Crafting Table, Redstone Dust, and Dropper.

It is not used in any crafting recipe.

How to get it

Craft it from 5 iron ingots, 2 redstone dust, 1 crafting table and 1 dropper. It is available as soon as you have iron and redstone, which makes it one of 1.21's more accessible additions.

Tips

Disable the slots your recipe does not use by clicking them, or arriving items will scatter and break the shape.
A comparator on the crafter outputs a signal proportional to how many slots are filled, which is how you time the pulse.
It crafts once per redstone pulse, not continuously, so drive it with an observer or a clock rather than a lever.
See five useful redstone builds for wiring patterns that suit an automatic crafter.

Version notes

The crafter was introduced in 1.21 (Tricky Trials) and is unchanged in 1.21.4.

Properties

Crafter has a blast resistance of 3.5, so a nearby explosion will usually destroy it. It blocks light completely and emits no light of its own. Stack size is 64 — the standard full stack.

Transparent: No
Required tool: Any