Crafting

Crafting is the way in which blocks and items are made in Minetest. To craft something, the player must move items into a crafting grid and then arrange the items into a defined pattern.

Many additional player created recipes and other crafting grids are available through mods.

Crafting basics

This section explains the basics of crafting in a very general way. The rules explained here are true for basically all mods.

Crafting grid and output slot

To be able to craft anything at all, you need a crafting grid. A crafting grid consists of a number of inventory slots and you can place and move and remove items from it like you can with an inventory. To craft, the items have to be arranged somehow in the crafting grid (see “Input and output”). Next to a crafting grid there is one output slot, in which the craft appears if you arranged the items in a valid way. Click on this symbol with the left mouse button to make this craft once. The needed items in the crafting grid will be used up. Click on the output slot with the middle mouse button to make this craft up to ten times (depending on how much items are left in the crafting grid). Crafting generally takes no time and you can use the resulting items immediately.

Crafting grids generally work like inventories. So a crafting grid found in your inventory menu can be used/abused as an extension of the player inventory.

You can’t place items on an output slot, however. You can only take items from it.

The player’s built-in 3×3 crafting grid (left). It’s output slot (right).

The vanilla Minetest game has only one crafting grid. It can be accessed through the inventory menu and it has a size of 3×3 slots.

Mods and Minetest games may add several crafting grids in various places, not just the inventory. It’s also possible that the inventory menu does not have a crafting grid.

Input and output

A crafting recipe consists of at least one input item and exactly one output item. Input items can be either concrete items (for example, Wooden Planks) or an item that is member of a group (for example, the wood group, a group where Wooden Planks and Junglewood Planks are members). If a recipe has multiple slots which require the same group, this does not mean that you have to place the same item in all of these slots. See #Crafting recipes using groups for a detailed example.

The vanilla Minetest game and other games and many mods make extensive use of the group system, understanding it is crucial to craft efficiently.

Using up the items

Normally, crafting one item removes exactly one item of each slot in the crafting grid.

A crafting recipe may also replace a item with an item instead. This is currently rarely used in mods. In the vanilla Minetest game, using Lava Bucket as furnace fuel does not use up the item, instead it leaves an Empty Bucket in the fuel slot.

Shaped and shapeless recipes

There are are two kinds of crafting recipes, shaped ones and shapeless ones.

For a shaped recipe, the items have to be arranged into an exact pattern. This wiki documents these patterns of the vanilla Minetest game. If a crafting recipe takes up a smaller rectangle than the crafting grid, it can be moved on any part of the crafting grid. For example, a 2×2 recipe can be arranged on the top left, top right, bottom left or bottom right on a 3×3 crafting grid. If a crafting recipe uses more space than available in the crafting grid, you are unable to craft this item with it. You need a larger one.

For a shapeless recipe, the necessary items just have to be placed on any available slots of the crafting grid. Stacking items does not work, however.

Most crafting recipes of the vanilla Minetest game are shaped recipes. If not noted otherwise, it is assumed that a crafting recipe is shaped. The shapeless recipes of the vanilla Minetest game produce bronze ingots, wool, flour and dyes, respectively.

Activities similar to crafting

Smelting and repairing are just a slightly different form of crafting, most rules described here apply, too. For smelting, the crafting grid is simply just 1×1. A repairing recipe is always shapeless recipe consisting of two tools of the same kind.

Example recipes

This section contains extensive examples of the basic crafting types. The examples here are all taken from the vanilla Minetest game.

Shapeless recipes

Bronze Ingot is an example for a shapeless recipe. You need one Steel Ingot and one Copper Ingot. You can put them anywhere in the crafting grid you want, so the following crafts are all valid:

Name	Ingredients	Input/Output
Bronze Ingot	Steel Ingot + Copper ingot
Bronze Ingot	Steel Ingot + Copper ingot
Bronze Ingot	Steel Ingot + Copper ingot

And so on.

To keep the wiki pages short and simple, in the actual page there is only one of the possible crafts shown.

Repairing recipes

If you have two worn off Steel Shovels, you can get one repaired one by placing them somewhere into the crafting grid:

Name	Ingredients	Input → Output
repaired Steel Shovel	worn off Steel Shovels

Note that repairing recipes are also shapeless. Repairing recipes are never explicitly shown in the wiki (except in this example).

Shaped recipes

These are all valid crafts of a shaped 3×1 crafting recipe:

Name	Ingredients	Input → Output
Paper	Papyrus
Paper	Papyrus
Paper	Papyrus

These crafts are all part of the same recipe. The actual wiki page does not repeat the other two crafts for simplicity’s sake.

Crafting recipes using groups

A crafting recipe using groups could be represented like this in the wiki:

Name	Ingredients	Input → Output
Furnace	“stone”-grouped items

Note that there is a special icon with a “G” in it. This icon is a placeholder for anything which is part of the “stone” group. So a furnace is build from 8 items from the stone group. Cobblestone and Desert Stone are examples for members of this group.

So you can build a furnace completely out of Cobblestone:

Name	Ingredients	Input → Output
Furnace	Cobblestones

Or Desert Stone:

Name	Ingredients	Input → Output
Furnace	Desert Stones

Or both mixed:

Name	Ingredients	Input → Output
Furnace	Cobblestones + Desert Stones

Or everything mixed up:

Name	Ingredients	Input → Output
Furnace	Stones + Desert Stones + Cobblestones + Desert Stone Brick + Stone Bricks

Getting started

To help you get you started in the vanilla Minetest game, we give you a list of the most important items and blocks to start with. Begin with the top of the list, check out the “Crafting” section of the respective page (in that order), craft the item in Minetest and return to this page when you have managed the craft, then go on with the next craft in the list. For convenience, the links put you directly to the “Crafting” section.

1. Wooden Planks
2. Stick
3. Ladder
4. Wooden Slab
5. Wooden Pickaxe
6. Stone Pickaxe
7. Cobblestone Stair
8. Torch
9. Chest
10. Furnace
11. any Axe
12. any Shovel
13. Bucket
14. any Hoe
15. Flour
16. Bread

See Blocks and Items for full lists of blocks and items. You find crafting recipes on the respective pages. Also check out the pages listed in Groups to get an overview for the group craftings.

See also

• Crafting guide
• Smelting
• Repairing
• Inventory
• Itemstrings