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

Requirements

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.