Minecraft Modding with Forge

Chapter 9. Recipes and Textures

Minecraft has three types of recipes: crafting, smelting, and brewing. Each recipe takes an input item and/or block and produces a new item or block. This chapter will teach you how to make new recipes for existing items and blocks in Minecraft and the new ones created earlier in this book. You will learn how to create different types of recipes. You will also learn about ways to customize your recipes by changing the placement, the experience, the items, and other factors.

If you recall, the new blocks that you created in Chapter 7 and the new items that you created in Chapter 8 had a somewhat unappealing purple-and-black texture. This chapter will also teach you how to make textures for them. You will learn about the directory structure of Forge textures and how you can make cool-looking textures for your mod.

Recipes

Forge provides support for all three types of recipes. A crafting recipe can be one of two types: shaped or shapeless. Smelting and brewing recipes have only one type.

Crafting recipes require items and blocks to be placed on a 2 × 2 or 3 × 3 crafting grid and in turn produce new items and blocks.

A shaped crafting recipe is a recipe that includes items in a certain pattern. For example, a piston has a shaped recipe. It has wood planks in the top row, an iron ingot in the middle, a redstone dust underneath, and cobblestone in the rest of the spaces. The recipe will not work unless you put these items in this exact order.

A shapeless ...