
⚙️ Mechanics
Piston packing
When a piston pushes items into a fully enclosed air space, it can compress them into a single block.
The space must be sealed on all six sides with blocks that have solid sides.
If the chamber isn’t fully closed, items won’t compress.This enables hands-free item processing and storage using only in-world physics and redstone.
Piston shoveling
- The Piston Shovel can be used to break all blocks that a silk touch netherite shovel can break.
Note that only blocks that are registered under the "piston_packing:piston_shovel_breakable" block tag can be broken with a piston shovel.
- The mod itself provides no built-in recipes — all compression logic is defined entirely through data pack recipes.
🧩 Custom Recipes
Define your own packing rules using standard JSON recipe files:
Each recipe describes what items can be packed, how many are required, and what the result should be.
Here’s an example:
{
"type": "piston_packing:packing",
"category": "building",
"ingredients": [
{
"count": 4,
"ingredient": {
"item": "minecraft:sand"
}
}
],
"result": {
"item": "minecraft:sandstone"
}
}
🪓 Acknowledgment
This mod ports functionality from the legendary Better Than Wolves mod,
originally created by FlowerChild and maintained by the CE Team.
👉 Better Than Wolves Official Site
- Edition: Minecraft Java
- File type: .jar
- Minecraft version listed: 1.21.1
- How to install: Install the matching mod loader (Forge, Fabric or NeoForge) for your Minecraft version. → Download the .jar. → Put it in the .minecraft/mods folder and launch that loader profile.
- Where to get it: Opens on Modrinth — not every file is mirrored on our own servers.
Install steps are the general flow for this file type — How to install Minecraft Java mods & modpacks walks through it step by step.
- Ships as piston-packing-0.1.jar — drop this file into the mods folder
- Download size: 72 KB
- Download link checked 20 Aug 2026 — working
These come from our own check of the pack file, not from the source page.