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](https://modrinth.com/mod/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.