Nookworks

Small, vanilla-friendly additions for the nooks and crannies of your builds - and, behind them, a modest workshop of machines: power, a mercury chemistry chain, liquid experience and a paper mill. Every block is drawn to look like it could have shipped with the game, and every feature is small enough to learn in a few seconds.

Beta. Played in singleplayer and on a dedicated server, and covered by automated in-game tests. It is still young, so if something goes wrong, please report it in the comments.

All recipes can be looked up in JEI (optional), which also has an information page for most blocks.

Building and decoration

• Rope: hang it under a block and climb it like a ladder. Use a rope on a rope to extend it from the bottom, however long it is; use it with an empty hand to pull the bottom length back up. Take the support away and the whole rope unravels.
• Sconce: a candle in a small iron dish, standing or on a wall. Placed unlit like a candle; light it with flint and steel, a fire charge or a burning arrow (light level 13), snuff it with an empty hand.
• Supports: squared timbers in every wood - a post, a beam, or a braced wall bracket to put a shelf on. Placed on a wall it is a bracket, on a floor a post; an axe changes the shape.
• Dice: tumbles on a right-click or a redstone pulse and lands on 1-6, which a comparator reads - a small random number generator. Rolled from the hand, it tells everyone nearby what came up.
• Nested Timer: a pulse every half second to an hour, set in its screen, with an optional second pulse after the first (pour a bucket of water from a dispenser, then take it back); a signal into its back or sides holds it. A dispenser throws Dice: they land and roll, ready for a piston to knock back into the loop.
• Glazed Flower Pot: a flower pot in cream glaze with a rim; it holds anything a flower pot holds.
• Hanging Planters (green and pink): the glazed bowl on four cords, with a trailing plant, hung under a block, chain or rope. The plant grows down below it, up to three blocks, over time or with bone meal.
• Thin Rope: a cord to hang things from (it can't be climbed), tied to the ceiling with a small black iron fitting.
• Chairs and Desks in every wood that has supports (thirteen, Dawnwood among them): seat and top in the wood's planks, legs in its stripped log. Sit on a chair with a right-click, sneak to get up; a desk is a top on four legs you can stand between. Both can be waterlogged.
• Posters: wall art from Fine Paper and dye, hung like a painting but only a sheet thick, and never picked at random the way paintings are. 55 designs, from 1x1 to 4x4, printed on the Printing Press (see below). Designs come from a datapack registry, so a pack can add its own with a PNG and a JSON file.
• Labels: small printed cards for chests, barrels and anything else. Put any item in the Printing Press's sample slot, and a sheet of Fine Paper with a drop of each ink prints eight labels with its picture. A label sticks where it is pressed - sneak, and it goes in the very middle of the face; clicking it opens the chest behind it, hitting it takes it off.
• Redstone Cogstone: a stone block that carries a signal in all six directions, one less per block, and powers what it touches.
• Fireproof Coating: brush it onto planks, logs, wool or anything else flammable and that block never burns - not from fire, not from spreading flames, not from lava. The coating moves with its block when a piston pushes it, and while you hold the tin, coated blocks nearby give off a faint sparkle.

Storage and moving things around

• Crate: a 3x3 box that keeps its contents when broken - a small, early carry box for moving house. Crates and shulker boxes do not go inside one.
• Storage Barrels (Iron, Gold, Diamond, Netherite, Velarium): barrels, not chests - they open with a block on top and face any way you place them. 27 / 54 / 81 / 108 / 135 slots, holding 2 / 4 / 16 / 256 / 1,024 stacks each. Broken, a barrel spills like a chest (only the Crate carries its contents); one holding more than 256 stacks (configurable) cannot be broken by hand until you take some out, so a warehouse cannot be dumped on the ground by accident. The screen scrolls, shortens big counts (6.4k, 12M), shows how full the barrel is and has a Sort button that gathers each kind of item together - by count, by item ID, by mod or last added first, as you choose. Empty barrels pack into other barrels.
• Item Sorter (Iron, Gold, Diamond, Netherite): items registered in its screen leave through one outlet, everything else through the other; one button swaps them. Registering is ghost-style, nothing is used up. Iron runs at hopper speed, Netherite 32 times faster. The Precision Sorter moves a whole stack a tick, has 18 filter slots, and can invert its filter, match by tag or tell a damaged item from a fresh one.
• Item Warp (sender and receiver): items dropped on or hoppered into the sender arrive at the nearest receiver in the same column, up to 64 blocks away. The Horizontal Item Warp sends straight ahead along a line instead. No power needed; a full chest makes the sender wait rather than lose anything.
• Elevator: stand on it and jump to reach the next elevator above, sneak for the one below - through any floors in between, up to 64 blocks.
• Magnet and Advanced Magnet: switch on with a right-click to pull in items and experience from 8 / 16 blocks. Sneak to pause. Magnet Chest: a chest that vacuums up dropped items within 5 blocks.
• Trash Can: destroys what a hopper or pipe feeds it - only while it has a redstone signal, and with the signal off it refuses items instead of quietly swallowing them.

Farming

• Dawnwood: a conifer thought long extinct. It grows nowhere in the world, but sifting dirt once in a long while turns up an Ancient Seed, and so does brushing the suspicious gravel of trail ruins; plant it and it grows into a tall, narrow tree with shaggy cinnamon bark and feathery leaves - and a whole wood set in its olive-coloured wood, from logs and planks through doors, signs, a shelf and boats.

• Nourished Soil: dirt fed with bone meal. Till it and water it like any bed, and what grows on it grows about four times as fast - but it is spent by degrees, fading back towards plain dirt, and ends as ordinary farmland. Walking on it ruins it.

• Wood Vinegar sprinkled on farmland: for three days rabbits leave the carrots in that 5x5 square alone, and Nourished Soil there wears out half as fast.

• Planter (FE): plants the seeds and saplings it holds into the 3x5 area in front of it.

• Laser (FE, the hungriest thing in the mod: 400 FE/t, plus 4,000 FE a tree): a turret that fires up to 8 blocks. It fells whole natural trees, hurts whatever stands in the beam, and may set uncoated flammable blocks alight. Planter plants, laser fells, Magnet Chest collects.

Mining and tools

• Tree felling: break a log with an axe and the whole tree comes down, and its leaves drop within seconds. Only natural trees: logs a player placed, and logs that belong to a village house or other generated building, are never taken, so a cabin built against a tree stays standing. Sneak to break one log.
• Vein mining: break an ore with a pickaxe that can mine it and the connected vein comes with it. Fortune, Silk Touch and Unbreaking work as if you mined every block by hand. Sneak for one block. Both stop before your tool breaks, do nothing in Creative, and are configurable (256 logs, 64 ores).
• Hammers (stone to netherite): mine a 3x3 square facing you, at 40% of the pickaxe's speed with four times its durability. They skip containers and anything much harder than what you hit. The Earthmover enchantment lets a hammer dig dirt, sand, gravel and wood too.
• Wrench: right-click to turn a block, sneak to turn it back. Sneak-right-click a side of a pipe or cable to disconnect it from whatever is there (and again to connect it).
• Lode Pearl: use an ender pearl on a lodestone to bind it there. Throw it anywhere - even into the void - and you are back at that lodestone, from any dimension, unhurt. One use; Soap washes the binding off.
• Building Wand: right-click a face and that block spreads across the flat surface, up to 32 at a time, from your inventory.
• Velarium gear: a full tool and armour set a tier above netherite, made from a metal no ore holds (see the mercury chain).

Machines and power (Forge Energy)

• Generator: burns anything a furnace burns into 40 FE/t (one coal is 64,000 FE), holds 50,000 FE and shares it evenly with everything connected. Its firebox lights up while it burns.
• Energy Cable: connects machines and other cables by itself, and works with other mods' FE machines.
• Crusher (20 FE/t, 3 s an item): cobblestone to gravel to sand, blocks back into what built them, logs into wood chips, bones into bone meal, and more. Recipes are a data map, so datapacks can add their own.
• Stone Maker (20 FE/t): a cobblestone a second into the container below.
• Electric Furnace (40 FE/t): smelts what a furnace smelts in half the time - a coal's worth of power does sixteen items. Fed by a Generator on piped oil or biodiesel, the smelting runs by itself.
• Sifter: sifts loose ground - gravel, sand, soil, mud and soul sand, and the Deepslate Gravel and Nether Grit the Crusher makes of rock - into flint, nuggets, clay, bones, seeds (pitcher pods included, for cyan dye), raw zinc and the odd gem. Fit a Brass Mesh and it works at half speed but keeps the small things - nearly twice the raw zinc. Sift by hand (the mesh is not used then), or feed it with a hopper. Datapack-extensible.
• Machine screens: right-click a machine with an empty hand. One look for all of them: a power gauge that turns amber and red when power runs short, an arrow that fills as the work goes on, the mercury tank and which way it flows, and one line saying what the machine is doing - or why it has stopped (no power, output blocked, missing a reagent, tower incomplete…). Holding an input still loads it straight in.
• Redstone control on every machine: always run, run with a signal, stop with a signal (the default) or never run.
• Machines are built on a Machine Chassis of iron and coal; hoppers and pipes work on every side, and results go into the container below (a chest opens under the Sifter; under the cabinet machines use a barrel or a hopper).

Mercury, zinc and Velarium

• Sealed Retort (FE): roasts cinnabar into liquid mercury and sulfur dust. Like a furnace it leaves experience behind, which it keeps as Liquid Experience for a pipe to draw off. It also boils sea water down to crude salt, cooks wood chips into pulp, and alloys copper and zinc into brass.
• Stirring Tank (FE): stirs gold ore - or iron, copper, or plain rock - with mercury into amalgam.
• Vacuum Distiller (FE; a tower of the distiller, two Distillation Columns and a Condenser): amalgam gives up its metal and 90% of the mercury comes back. About five gold ingots from one gold ore; rock gives random ores.
• Mercury Tank and Mercury Pipe move it around (mercury stays out of other mods' fluid systems). Liquid mercury is toxic to touch.
• Zinc: the Sifter now and then finds raw zinc; smelt it and alloy it into brass in the Retort.
• Velarium: a rare metal that forms no ore at all. Any distillation run can leave a single nugget behind - most often from plain rock - and nine make an ingot.
• Gunpowder from sulfur: sulfur dust, charcoal and bone meal.

Salt, caustic soda and paper

• Grill: an iron grate on four legs over a campfire - lay meat, fish and potatoes on it, and take them off done. Anywhere else it stands as a small table.
• Iron Pot: set it over the fire with water or vegetable oil. In water, Bowls of Rice and Vegetable Soup (and from the rice, Salted and Salmon Rice Balls); in oil, French Fries, Karaage, Fried Fish, Fried Rice and Stir-Fried Vegetables - and, with Flour and Breadcrumbs from the Crusher, Tonkatsu (flour on chicken or fish fries two pieces where it alone fries one). What is cooking lies in the pot for you to see.
• Rice: sifted out of soil and mud as brown rice. Plant it in shallow water; it heads up into a second block of panicles that ripen gold. The Rice Polisher (by hand or Motor) makes it white rice to cook, and Rice Bran for oil, fertilizer and chickens. With Farmer's Delight installed the Sifter gives its rice instead.
• Nukadoko: pickle carrots and beetroots in salted rice bran.
• Biodiesel: dry-distil wood into wood vinegar, distil methanol from it, and turn oil into biodiesel in the Iron Pot or, piped and by hopper, in the Stirring Tank - a fuel that burns twice as long as the oil. The Generator takes oil or biodiesel by pipe, so seeds to power runs by itself.
• Soap: oil boiled with caustic soda; washes the dye out of wool, beds, glass and terracotta, and the oil and fireproofing off a block.
• Water Pump (FE) and Copper Pipe: set the pump on water and pipe it to the Retort. A pool of two or more sources never runs dry. The same pipe carries vegetable oil.
• Oil Press: turn its handle to press sunflowers and pumpkin and melon seeds into Vegetable Oil (bottles, buckets or a pipe), with Oil Cake left over as fertilizer. A Motor (FE) turns the handle for you. Oil burns as fuel, and with sulfur in an Oil Can it silences doors, trapdoors, fence gates and pistons.
• Oil Lamp: an unglazed clay dish with a wick of rush pith. Pour vegetable oil in and light it as a candle is lit; a softer light than a torch, and a full dish burns for about a day.
• Sight Glass, Valve and Copper Tank for the copper line: a glass chamber in the pipe that shows what runs through it and how much (a comparator reads it too), a valve turned by hand or by redstone, and a 16-bucket tank for water, oil or biodiesel that keeps its contents when broken.
• Boil sea water to Crude Salt in the Retort (by the bucket or piped in), wash it into Salt in the Sifter, and run it through the Stirring Tank and Distiller as a mercury cell into Caustic Soda (95% of the mercury comes back).
• Crush logs into Wood Chips, cook them with caustic soda and sulfur into Wood Pulp (one pulp crafts 3 paper), and press pulp into Fine Paper.
• Printing Press (FE): load Fine Paper and the four process inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) and choose a page. Posters: pick a design from a grid of the artwork itself (smallest first) and press Print for a copy. Labels: put a sample in the slot under Print, and beside it the label shows on a barrel's side as it will look. Hoppers keep it stocked.

Liquid experience

• Absorption Pad: pulls in experience orbs from 6 blocks and drains anyone standing on it, turning both into Liquid Experience (20 mB a point, tagged #c:experience, so other mods' tanks and pipes take it).
• Experience Pipe and Experience Tank (16 buckets): glass pipes with the liquid glowing inside, and a tank whose window shows how full it is. Turn the tank's tap and the experience pours out as a stream of orbs; a pipe run beside the pad drops down to it.
• Repair Box (FE + Liquid Experience): a chest that mends whatever is damaged inside it, Mending or not, and only lets a finished item leave, so a hopper can cycle gear through it. Two side by side join into one box of twelve slots that shares its power and experience.
• Liquid Experience burns whatever stands in it, and credits the kill to the nearest player, so player-only drops still fall under a mob farm.

Mobs and spawners

• Mob Bottle: catch a mob at half health or less, and let it out again anywhere - the same mob, with its name, its health, a villager's trades or a donkey's chest. A pet goes in only by its owner's hand; bosses and players cannot be caught.
• Spawn Egg Brewer: a filled Mob Bottle and an egg become that mob's spawn egg, fuelled by blaze powder. The bottle comes back empty.
• Spawner control: a Silk Touch hammer picks up a spawner with its mob. Link spawners to a Spawner Controller (FE) with a Spawner Link Sender and Receiver, and set on/off, interval, mobs per spawn, nearby cap, light rules and whether a player must be near.
• Dark Matter: cook cooked food again and it chars; four Charred Lumps round an amethyst block make it. It puts out the light in a disc round it - its own layer and the one above, as far as water would spread - outdoors at noon as well: monsters spawn there by day and zombies do not burn. Anything giving light inside the disc lifts the dark while it shines, so a redstone lamp makes a switch.

Quality of life

• Trimmed vines: cut a vine with shears and it stops spreading, as glow berry vines do, so a curtain of vines hangs as you left it.
• Inventory tweaks (client-side): scroll over an item to move it one at a time, and hold Shift while dragging to quick-move every slot you pass. They switch themselves off when Mouse Tweaks is installed.
• Plays well with others: tree felling, vein mining, hammers, the magnet and the Building Wand stand down when a mod that does the same job is installed (for example FallingTree, FTB Ultimine, Just Hammers, Simple Magnets, Building Gadgets). The lists are in the config.
• An advancement tab lays out every part of the mod - power, mercury, paper, the kitchen, oil, the fields, Dawnwood, the copper line, experience and mobs - so the order to do things in is somewhere to look rather than something to remember.
• Jade (optional): looking at a machine, a pot, a grill or a tank tells you what it is doing.
• Everything gameplay-related is configurable per world (Mods → Nookworks → Config).

Compatibility

• Minecraft Java 26.2, NeoForge 26.2.0.88 or later, Java 25.
• Needed on both the server and the client. JEI and Jade are optional.
• English and Japanese.

How this mod was made

Nookworks is made with AI (Claude, by Anthropic) under the author's direction: the author decides what goes in, tries it and plays it; the AI writes the code, this page and the textures, which are drawn by scripts kept with the source. Every feature is checked by automated in-game tests. Every screenshot on this page is a real in-game capture, not retouched (the machine screen is cropped from one).

License

MIT. All of the mod's textures are its own; models also use vanilla textures by name, and no vanilla images are included.