Crafting with the crafter

HOW TO USE THE CRAFTER 

Crafting a crafter sounds like a tongue twister, but it’s pretty easy. You’ll need five iron ingots, a crafting table, two lots of redstone dust, and a dropper. Arrange them in another crafting table like in the picture below, and you’ll get yourself a crafter – nifty! Pop it on the ground and we’ll take a look at the interface together.  

At the bottom, you’ve got your inventory – just like with a chest or a regular crafting grid. On the top right, you’ve got the output – this is where the things you craft will show up. On the top left, you have the input slots, and this is where the magic happens. 

You can use a crafter like a normal crafting bench, and it’ll work just fine – fill the slots on the left with your ingredients, and take the resulting product pops straight out into your Minecraft world. But we’re not here to use the crafter like a crafting table. We’re here to AUTOMATE! So, let's talk about how that works. 

CRAFTER AUTOMATION

A crafter acts whenever it receives a redstone pulse – from a button, a lever, a pressure plate, or whatever. When that happens, it’ll light up, take the contents of the input slots, craft it into whatever it can (which might be nothing), and spit the results out into your face. Ouch. 

But here’s where we put the “fun” in “functional” – hook up some redstone circuitry to deliver regular pulses over time and you’ve got yourself some automation!  

AUTO-CRAFTING MADE EASY

The most compact way to automate your crafting is to build a “clock” circuit. This is a circuit that pulses over time, and one of the simplest ways to create it is probably to use a pair of redstone repeaters connected with redstone dust, like in the following screenshot. Place the redstone torch last to activate it. 

The automation opportunities (autotunities?) don’t end there. Crafters can be fed ingredients from hoppers – allowing an industrious player the ability to batch-process hundreds of items without needing to run each stack manually through a crafting table. 

PLANKS FOR DAYS 

That was all quite a lot of detail, so let’s look at another simple example – let’s imagine you want to process logs into planks. Plop down a barrel, and connect a hopper to it. This is where your planks will be collected.  

Standing on top of the hopper, place a crafter down on top of the barrel, so that its “face” points towards the hopper. Hit the “use” button on the crafter to access its interface and disable all but one slot – we only need a single slot to be active for us to craft planks. 

Next, around the back of the crafter, sneak-place a second hopper feeding into the crafter, and put a second barrel on top of that second hopper. Fill this second barrel with logs. Now jump down and check your crafter again – the input slot that wasn’t disabled should be filling up with logs. If it isn't then try again, using the image above as a reference. 

All we need now is a redstone pulse. One quick option is to put a button on the crafter – every time that you click it, you’ll convert one log into four wood, which will be collected in the bottom barrel. For better results, though, hook up a redstone clock system like the one above instead, and connect it to the crafter – this will quickly craft its way through your logpile, turning it into a plankpile instead. 

DARE TO BE CRAFTY 

The crafter holds the key to unlocking your untapped potential and we can’t wait to see what you make with it. Want to get bonus points? Set up a system that constantly crafts crafters. Only when the Overworld is full of nothing but crafters will our work ever be complete! 

Oh, and stay tuned to minecraft.net for more tips, tricks, plank-related jokes as we prepare to enter the trial chambers!