better-creative

Arcadia Better Creative 1.0.0 — first release

Configure the creative inventory tab bar: sort it, pin what you use, hide what you don't.

Features

• Sorting — vanilla order, A→Z, Z→A, or a custom order you arrange yourself.
• Pinning — pinned tabs are forced to the front of the bar.
• Hiding — remove tabs you never open, with a Hide all but pinned bulk action for large packs.
• In-game settings — a ⚙ button in the creative inventory, plus the usual mod list entry. Includes a search box that filters by tab name or by mod id.
• Presets — save named layouts and switch between them.
• Search scope (optional, off by default) — restrict the creative search tab to items from tabs you have not hidden.

Compatibility

Client-side only. It works on vanilla servers and does not need to be installed server-side.

The creative tab registry is never modified — only the list the creative screen consumes is reordered — so mods that read it, such as JEI and EMI, are unaffected. This also means JEI and EMI keep showing items from tabs you hid here; they maintain their own ingredient lists and have their own hiding features.

The hotbar, search, operator blocks and inventory tabs are positioned by a separate NeoForge code path and cannot be sorted, pinned or hidden.

Notes

• Settings are client-side and global: one configuration shared by every world and every server, stored in config/arcadia/.
• Enabling search scope removes items from search results. It rebuilds tab contents once on the next creative screen open, so that first open is slower.
• This mod neither causes nor fixes slow creative inventory opening in heavy modpacks. A spark profile of a ~400 mod pack measured it at 4 ms across the session. The delay comes from the game building every tab's contents and indexing tooltips, which happens regardless of what is hidden.
• Needing two clicks on the search tab after reopening the inventory is vanilla behaviour, present without this mod installed.

Testing

Tested on Minecraft 1.21.1 with NeoForge 21.1.241, both in a clean environment and in a ~400 mod pack alongside JEI, EMI, ModernFix and Bookshelf. The search scope was verified against Create's tabs. A spark profile measured this mod at 4 ms total.

Not yet tested: running alongside another creative tab management mod, and moving a preset between two different modpacks.