Okay, let’s talk about putting together an auto crafter. I got tired of manually clicking recipes over and over, especially for bulk stuff like iron blocks or whatever. It just eats up time, right?
Getting Started – The Idea
So, the first thing I did was scout a good spot. Needed some space, obviously, and ideally close to where I store my raw materials. Makes sense to have the input chests nearby. I cleared out a decent chunk of floor space in my workshop area.
Then I grabbed the basic bits I thought I’d need. Lots of redstone dust, some repeaters, comparators for sure, definitely needed hoppers, and droppers too. Oh, and chests, plenty of chests for input and output. And of course, the star of the show – the Crafter block itself. Without that, well, it’s not an auto crafter, is it?
Figuring Out the Input
Okay, setting up the input was the first puzzle. I wanted to just dump materials into chests and have them feed into the Crafter. So, I placed a chest, maybe a double chest, on top. Then I ran hoppers pointing down into the top of the Crafter block. Seemed simple enough.
But wait, the recipe slots! You can’t just jam everything in randomly. I realized I needed to control which hopper feeds which slot in the Crafter. So, I had to arrange multiple hoppers, maybe coming in from the sides or back as well, each aimed at a specific slot. This got a bit fiddly, making sure the hoppers didn’t lock each other and actually pointed where I wanted them.
Quick thought here: Maybe using filtered hoppers could work for complex recipes later, but for simple stuff, just dedicated input chests feeding specific slots via hoppers seemed the way to go initially.
The Crafting Pulse – Making it Work
Just feeding items isn’t enough. The Crafter needs a redstone signal to actually do the crafting. My first thought was just a simple lever. Flick it on, it crafts. Flick it off, it stops. But that’s not very “auto”, is it? I wanted it to craft whenever it could.
So, the next step was building a clock circuit. I messed around with a basic repeater clock first. You know, the loop where repeaters chase each other? It worked, kind of. It pulsed the Crafter constantly.
- Placed redstone dust leading to the Crafter.
- Built a small repeater loop next to it.
- Used a lever to kickstart the clock.
This was okay, but it pulsed even if the Crafter wasn’t full or didn’t have the right ingredients. A bit wasteful on the pulses, maybe? Not a huge deal, but felt clunky.
Then I remembered comparators. They can detect if a container has stuff in it. I tried hooking up a comparator reading the Crafter block itself. The idea was, if the Crafter has items, the comparator sends a signal. I tried feeding that signal back into the Crafter to trigger it. This got complicated fast, trying to turn a steady signal (items are present) into a pulse (craft now!). Maybe a comparator clock is better? Or using the comparator to enable a separate clock?
Okay, simpler idea: what if the pulse came after items were loaded? I focused back on the hopper feed. Could I detect when items arrived? Not easily without making it super complex.
Refining the Trigger and Output
I went back to the simple clock idea but added a master switch (a lever) to turn the whole thing on or off easily. Good enough for now.
Now, output. The crafted item pops out the front. Easy fix: put a hopper underneath the Crafter block, pointing into an output chest. Done. If the chest gets full, the hopper backs up, the Crafter fills up, and eventually, it stops crafting if the input hoppers also back up. Sort of a natural back-pressure system.
Putting it Together – The Final(ish) Setup
So, the basic setup I settled on was:
- Input chest(s) on top or feeding from the back/sides.
- Hoppers carefully pointing into the specific slots of the Crafter block. Make sure you lock slots you don’t want items going into by clicking them in the Crafter’s UI! This was a key thing I missed at first.
- The Crafter block itself.
- A simple redstone clock (like a repeater loop or an observer-based one) providing a regular pulse to the Crafter. I added a lever to this clock line to easily turn the whole machine on or off.
- A hopper underneath the Crafter’s output face.
- An output chest fed by the output hopper.
Testing and Thoughts
I tested it with something simple, like crafting iron ingots into blocks. Loaded the chest with iron ingots, locked the unused slots in the Crafter GUI, flipped the clock lever. And yeah, it started spitting out iron blocks into the bottom chest! Success!
It’s not the most sophisticated design, probably. You could get fancy with comparators to only pulse when it’s full, or use item filters for multiple recipe types in one machine, but that’s way more complex. For bulk crafting one specific item? This hopper-clock-crafter setup works reliably. It’s noisy with the clock ticking, but hey, it saves my clicking finger. Definitely a worthwhile little project.
