Flatts's Things

Blocks, tools and small features that vanilla never shipped.

There is no tech tree here and nothing gates anything else. Take the whole set or none of it.

Player Pressure Plates

A pressure plate only a player can press. One for every vanilla plate, fourteen in all.

Vanilla gives you two choices and neither is this one. A wooden plate fires for anything that touches it, so an arrow you shot at your own door opens it. A stone plate fires for anything alive, so the cow that wandered into your base opens it too.

Put a player plate in front of the door instead. The cow stands on it and nothing happens.

Everything else about it is the plate you already know: the same hold, the same click, the same redstone out of it, the same profile underfoot. It mines with the same tool, burns in the same furnace, and takes the same piston shove. Only the sensitivity changed.

Craft one from the plate you have and a redstone dust.

Tool slots

Five slots under your inventory, for tools, that are not part of your inventory space. The pickaxe, the axe, the shovel and the hoe stop taking four of your nine hotbar slots.

They are slots in the inventory screen you already open. Clicking, dragging and shift-clicking work the way they do everywhere else, because they are ordinary slots. Four of them show a faint outline of what belongs in them. The fifth is blank; it is the free one.

Swords do not fit, and that is deliberate. These slots feed the swap below, and a stored sword would mean something putting a weapon in your hand while you are mining.

The right tool, without asking for it

Start breaking a block and the tool for it comes into your hand. Stop, and whatever you were carrying comes back.

It picks by the same arithmetic the game uses to decide how fast a block breaks, so another mod's pickaxe sorts correctly against a vanilla one, and a tie leaves what you are already holding alone.

Press Z to turn it off and on. It says which way it went above your hotbar, and it remembers across death and logout.

An enchanted golden apple, enchanted

Put a golden apple in an enchanting table, spend the levels and the lapis, and take out the real thing. The offer is called Blessing, and it needs thirty levels, so a bare table cannot reach it.

A Blessing book works too, on an anvil, one apple at a time.

Silk touch takes budding amethyst

Vanilla drops nothing for it, with any tool. This lets silk touch pick it up, and a geode becomes something you can move.

That restriction is deliberate in vanilla, and lifting it is the whole feature. The switch is there for anyone who wants it back.

Three gravel, one flint

Vanilla gives you flint one gravel in ten, and the gravel that does not roll flint drops as gravel, so a Fortune shovel and a wall to re-place it against turns every stack into flint eventually. This buys that loop out: three gravel on a bench, one flint, no dice.

Concrete and mud in a cauldron

Dip a stack of concrete powder in a water cauldron and it sets. Dirt comes out as mud.

Both are things you can already do one block at a time, against a water source or with a bottle. The cauldron does the stack, for one of its three levels.

Armoured elytra

Put a chestplate and an elytra on an anvil. The chestplate comes back gliding, and keeps its armour, its enchantments, its trim and its name.

The elytra is used up, and anything enchanted on the elytra goes with it. From then on flying wears the chestplate, and it stops gliding one durability before it breaks, the way an elytra does.

This one takes away a choice the game makes you make. Turn it off if you want that choice back.

The woodcutter

A saw bench for wood. A log cuts into planks, or strips, or turns to bark. A stripped log makes a shelf. Planks make stairs, slabs, buttons or sticks.

Everything comes out at the rate a crafting table would give you. Doors and fences stay on the crafting table, where they cost what they should.

One plank makes one stair, where a crafting bench wants six for four. The game has a cutter for stone and nothing for wood.

Craft it from planks and an iron ingot.

Slabs of the ground

Dirt, grass, mycelium, coarse dirt, rooted dirt, podzol, mud, clay, gravel, sand and red sand, at half height. Eleven of them.

Vanilla has a slab of everything you build with and none of what you stand on, so a path that steps up half a block has to stop being ground.

They keep doing what the block does. Grass spreads onto them and dies back under cover, and a dirt slab left beside a grass block greens over on its own. Sand and gravel fall. You sink into mud. Grass takes its colour from the biome, the way the block does, so a slab in a swamp and a slab in a plain are not the same green.

Snow lies on a top slab and turns it white. It does not on a bottom slab, because the snow above is not touching it.

Three across a bench makes six, the way every slab is made. Gravel is the exception at six for twelve, because three gravel on a bench is already flint.

Powered rails from copper

The same recipe as the gold one, with copper where the gold goes. Three rails instead of six.

Vanilla puts the only rail that speeds a cart up behind six gold for six rails, which is why early rail is mostly pushing. Copper is the metal you have tonnes of and little to do with.

Half the yield is what keeps gold worth using. What comes out is the ordinary powered rail: no new block, nothing oxidises, and you could not tell it from one made with gold.

Every one of these has an off switch

config/flattsthings-common.toml, one line each. Off means no recipe and nothing in the creative tab, and the behaviour stops. It never removes anything you have already built or stored.

Not in yet

Eleven features, and each one had to earn its place on its own. More will follow the same way.