Firstworks

Firstworks brings primitive, hands-on processing into the world through functional wooden Barrels and hand-operated Looms. Load materials directly into each workstation and watch the work take shape without a machine screen or instant conversion.

Cordage, weaving, and leatherworking form the first complete production chains, built around reusable processing systems for grounded survival progression.

The Barrel

Holds materials and fluids for processing
Processes recipes over time while open or sealed, as the recipe requires
Displays stored items and fluids directly in the world
Opens and seals by hand without a GUI
Responds to rising redstone pulses for simple automation
Supports item and fluid transfer through standard NeoForge capabilities
Locks automated item and fluid transfer while sealed
Comes in every vanilla wood family
Accepts custom recipes from datapacks and KubeJS

Fill a Barrel with buckets or bottles, add a material, and seal it to begin a valid process. Opening it early stops the current progress but leaves the contents in place.

Fibre, cordage, and stronger tools

Gather Plant Fibre from grass and ferns, twist emergency Crude Cordage, and ret better fibres in a Barrel. Hold a durable Hand Spindle with fibre in your offhand to spin it into Twine, complete with a rotating three-dimensional spindle, working sounds, and particles. Twine can be woven into Cloth or combined into Rope. Gathering by hand has a modest chance to produce fibre, while using a sword guarantees it. Wooden and stone tools need a simple binding, while iron, gold, and diamond tools call for proper Rope.

Hide tanning

Animals drop Raw Hide instead of ready-made leather. Producing leather now demonstrates the full primitive workflow:

Soak Raw Hide in water.
Scrape the softened hide with a sword.
Strip logs with an axe to gather Tree Bark.
Brew bark and water into Tannin Solution inside a sealed Barrel.
Tan the scraped hide in the solution.
Dry the treated hide in a furnace.

The result is still vanilla leather, but it comes from a small workshop and a process you can see rather than a single crafting recipe.

Fleece, wool, and bedding

Sheep provide Raw Fleece in the color of their coat. Wash it in a sealed Barrel to make Clean Wool, recolor it with dyes when needed, and pack matching wool into blocks. A proper bed brings the fibre and wool crafts together, requiring Cloth, Clean Wool, and planks.

Weaving by hand

Turn Twine or String into Cloth on a functional wooden Loom. Load thread directly onto the frame, then work the shuttle by hand as the woven material visibly grows. Finished Cloth is collected from the Loom itself, and unfinished thread can be removed without opening a menu.

A Loom for every vanilla wood family
Accurate frame-shaped collision and selection bounds
Smooth shuttle movement and visible weaving progress
Output-driven weave colors that also work with custom recipes
Data-driven Barrel, spindle, and Loom recipes with typed KubeJS recipe/event support
Item capabilities for loading thread and extracting finished work
Empty-hand interaction compatible with deployer-style automation

Made for survival and modpacks

Firstworks can stand alone as a tactile early-game mechanic or serve as the primitive processing layer of a larger progression pack. Its leather, textile, and tool-binding progressions can each be adjusted to fit the experience you want.

Optional integrations make the system easier to read without changing its in-world character:

Jade shows live Barrel status and Loom loading, weaving progress, and completed output.
JEI adds dedicated Barrel Processing, Hand Spinning, and Loom Weaving recipe categories.

Credits

Firstworks is inspired by TerraFirmaCraft and its hands-on approach to believable survival progression.

Available for Minecraft 1.21.1 on NeoForge.