Craftback Chest

Craftback Chest is reverse crafting with rules and memory.

Instead of letting you break anything back into ingredients for free, the chest keeps track of what has actually been crafted and only returns what the world has truly earned. The result is a powerful recycling tool that still feels fair in survival, rewarding organized players without opening the door to duplication abuse.

If you have ever wanted a way to undo crafting mistakes, break large projects back down into parts, or recover materials from old builds without turning reverse crafting into a cheat button, this is exactly what the mod is built for.

Reverse crafting that feels earned

The Craftback Chest does not magically invent materials.

It only uncrafts items that already have a matching crafting history behind them. If you crafted the item before, the chest can work with it. If you did not, it will refuse.

That means the chest feels generous when cleaning up your own work, but never sloppy or exploitable.

Every craft creates a receipt

Whenever you craft something normally, the mod records a receipt for that exact result.

Those receipts are what power the chest later. Put crafted items into the chest and it checks whether the right crafting history exists before returning ingredients.

This makes the entire system easy to understand:

Craft items normally
Store, use, or stockpile them however you want
Feed them back into the chest later when you want the ingredients back

No dupes, no loopholes, no nonsense

The entire design is built around preventing free resource generation.

One uncraft action consumes one matching receipt. If the receipt is gone, the chest stops. If there is no room for the returned ingredients, it refuses to continue. If something about the item would make the reversal unsafe or unclear, the chest blocks it instead of guessing.

It is reverse crafting with the convenience people want and the safeguards survival worlds need.

Shared chest history for multiplayer bases

A placed Craftback Chest can be used by more than one player.

Anyone who uses that specific chest can contribute their crafting history to it, allowing the chest to draw from multiple linked ledgers over time instead of only one person. It still spends receipts one at a time, but it can serve a group naturally.

That makes the block especially good for:

Shared workshops
Town storage rooms
Co-op base cleanups
Team projects where materials are constantly being crafted and reclaimed

Chest behavior that feels alive

The chest does not instantly pop every item apart the moment it touches them.

It wakes up, scans what is inside, and processes uncrafting over time. This gives it a deliberate, machine-like rhythm instead of feeling like a bland conversion box.

You can drop in a messy pile of crafted items, let it think, and watch it work through the valid ones in sequence.

Clear status messages instead of silent failure

The interface is built to explain itself.

If something is not being uncrafted, the chest tells you why. It can report when it is waking up, waiting for the next cycle, missing a receipt, lacking space, refusing an unsupported recipe, or rejecting an item because it carries data it should not safely reverse.

That means less confusion, less guessing, and a much smoother experience when sorting large mixed inventories.

Great for cleanup, storage, and second thoughts

The mod shines in all the moments where you realize your old crafted stock is no longer what you need.

Some examples:

Break spare tools, blocks, and components back into useful parts
Recover ingredients from outdated projects instead of throwing them away
Convert old batches of crafted items into something more useful for the current job
Clean out chests full of crafted clutter without feeling like you are wasting progress

It turns “I wish I had made something else” into a solvable problem.

Cascading uncraft chains

If you have the receipts, the chest can keep going.

That means an item returned by one uncraft can become the input for another later on. Crafted parts can work their way back through multiple steps, letting you reclaim value from complex crafting chains instead of stopping at the first layer.

This makes the chest especially satisfying in long-running worlds where storage naturally fills with older crafted materials.

What the chest will not do

The mod is intentionally strict.

Items with unsupported extra data are blocked. Damaged items need to be restored first. Recipes that leave special container remainders are not reversed. If the returned ingredients would overflow the inventory, the chest will wait rather than destroy value.

Those restrictions are there to keep the system trustworthy.

Why it feels better than normal reverse crafting mods

Most reverse crafting systems answer one question:

“Can this item be broken down?”

Craftback Chest answers a better one:

“Has this item actually been crafted, and can it be reversed safely?”

That small difference changes everything. It makes recycling feel earned, keeps progression intact, and gives survival players a powerful utility block that does not cheapen the rest of the game.

Who this mod is for

Craftback Chest is a strong fit if you like:

Survival-friendly quality of life
Smarter storage management
Undoing crafting mistakes without cheating
Multiplayer workshop logistics
Systems that are powerful, but still respect progression

If you want reverse crafting that belongs in an actual survival world instead of bypassing it, this is the point of the mod.

Pepsi's Craftback Chest

Fabric API