Better Crafting Recipes

This mod adds a small set of balanced, progression-gated crafting recipes for vanilla items that are normally rare, RNG-locked, or tied to loot you might never find — without turning survival into a free-loot shortcut. Every recipe is unlocked by doing something in the world first (killing a set number of a specific mob, taming a horse, catching fish, or discovering a specific structure/biome), not by grinding levels or paying currency.

This is not a "make everything craftable" mod. Each recipe was chosen because the vanilla acquisition path is either extremely RNG-heavy (tridents), loot-locked to a rare structure (crying obsidian, spore blossoms), or otherwise disproportionately frustrating relative to how common the item is used — and each one is gated behind a real, deliberately-tuned requirement so the recipe still respects normal progression instead of skipping it.

What you get

Recipes

• 10 gated recipes, each with its own unlock requirement:
  • Shulker Box — kill 30 Blazes
  • Wet Sponge (Ocean Monument replication) — defeat 6 Elder Guardians
  • Saddle — tame a horse
  • Diamond Horse Armor — tame a horse (shares the saddle's taming progress)
  • Name Tag — catch 25 fish
  • Trident — defeat 40 Drowned
  • Totem of Undying — defeat 10 Evokers
  • Elytra — obtain an Elytra first (crafts spares once you've legitimately found one)
  • Crying Obsidian — discover a Bastion Remnant
  • Spore Blossom — discover a Lush Cave

In-game Journal

• An in-game Unlock Journal (default keybind: R) styled to look like a genuine vanilla container/recipe-book screen — browse every recipe, its requirement, live progress, and the exact 3×3 crafting grid, with a short note on why each one is gated the way it is.

Progress Tracker

• Track your progress in-game: pick one or several recipes to track from the Journal and a small HUD widget shows live progress in the corner of your screen — a single detailed bar for one tracked recipe, or a compact row of icons once you're tracking more than one at a time. Choose top-left or top-right placement for the HUD in Settings.

Recent Unlocks

• A "Recent Unlocks" feed and a small in-world celebration (particles + a sound, both togglable in Settings) the moment a tracked recipe actually unlocks.

Requirements

Client/Server

Works in both singleplayer and on a dedicated server — every version/loader combination below was verified against a real installed server, not just a dev environment. If you want the in-game Journal/HUD, install the mod on the client too; a server-only install still gates the recipes correctly, it just won't show the Journal screen to players who don't have the mod client-side.

Minecraft	Fabric	NeoForge
1.21.1	Loader 0.19.3+, Fabric API 0.116.13+1.21.1, Java 21+	NeoForge 21.1.234+, Java 21+
1.21.4	Loader 0.19.3+, Fabric API (0.119.4+1.21.4+), Java 21+	NeoForge 21.4.157+, Java 21+
26.1	Loader 0.19.3+, Fabric API 0.155.2+26.1.2, Java 25+	NeoForge 26.1.2.93+, Java 25+
26.2	Loader 0.19.3+, Fabric API (0.155.2+26.2+), Java 25+	NeoForge 26.2.0.40-beta+, Java 25+ (only beta builds exist for 26.2 so far)

Fabric API is a required dependency on every Fabric version listed above (this mod uses its networking/HUD/keybind helpers directly) — grab the matching version from Modrinth alongside this mod.

Notes on the version range

Minecraft's own versioning changed to a year.drop scheme in 2026 (26.1, 26.2, ...). Two vanilla items this mod used to gate — Saddle and Name Tag — became natively craftable in vanilla itself (Saddle in the 2025 "Chase the Skies" update, Name Tag in 26.1). On 26.1+ builds those two recipes are therefore redundant with vanilla's own recipe, not broken — they're kept for consistency across the supported version range, but you'll effectively already have an equivalent vanilla recipe for those two specific items on the newest Minecraft versions.