Modding:Creating Recipes

This page was last verified for Vintage Story version 1.19.

This page is outdated!
Some details may not be accurate, so use with caution! Please view the simple recipes tutorial for an up-to-date page!

Before creating recipes, we suggest you read Basic Item first in order to understand this tutorial.

Basics

Let's create a recipe for our wand, which we added in basic items tutorial. Other recipes can be found in assets/survival/recipes/

Ingredient Pattern

Let's begin by declaring the pattern or layout of the recipe, in our example we'll want the player to place a pickaxe on top of 2 sticks

which would look like this:

	ingredientPattern: "P,S,S",
	width: 1,
	height: 3,

P and S are identifiers which will be defined later. Every row is separated with one comma or tab (no space!), while an empty cell is marked with an underscore _. The width of this recipe is 1 and it is 3 rows high.

Ingredients

All we need to do now is to define the identifiers we have used before. In our example P stands for a copper pickaxe and S for an ordinary stick.

	ingredients: {
		"P": { type: "item", code: "game:pickaxe-copper"},
		"S": { type: "item", code: "game:stick"}
	},

Type is either block or item depending whether it's an item or a block.

When recipes have vanilla items they need game: in front of the item name. When they are from your own mod you can just put the item name.

In order to find out the code of each item (or block), you can type .edi into console, which will add the code property to the tooltip:

Furthermore, we could add a required quantity to our ingredients, so instead of one stick per slot we could make it require more:

	ingredients: {
		"P": { type: "item", code: "game:pickaxe-copper"},
		"S": { type: "item", code: "game:stick", quantity: 2}
	},

Another thing we could do is instead of consuming the pickaxe, we could use it as a tool:

	ingredients: {
		"P": { type: "item", code: "game:pickaxe-copper", isTool: true},
		"S": { type: "item", code: "game:stick"}
	},

This would cause the pickaxe to lose one durability during crafting, instead of consuming the whole pickaxe at once.

Output

We still need to define the output, which is rather similar to defining the ingredients:

	output: { type: "item", code: "wand-pickaxe"}

Theoretically, we could add the quantity property here as well.

Distributing

This is what our final recipe looks like:

{
	ingredientPattern: "P,S,S",
	width: 1,
	height: 3,
	ingredients: {
		"P": { type: "item", code: "game:pickaxe-copper"},
		"S": { type: "item", code: "game:stick"}
	},
	output: { type: "item", code: "wand-pickaxe"}
}

In order to add those crafting recipes to your mod, you have to create another folder in your workspace assets/myadvancedwand/recipes/grid/ and copy the files in there.

You can download the full mod including the items (Pre 1.15)here.

Advanced

Type based recipes

There are more complicated things you can do with recipes. This the recipe for wooden planks which are crafted out of logs:

{
	ingredientPattern: "L",
	ingredients: {
		"L": { type: "block", code: "game:log-*-ud", name: "wood" }
	},
	width: 1,
	height: 1,
	output: { type: "block", code: "planks-{wood}-hor", quantity: 4  }
}

Instead of having a recipe for every wood type, you can assign a name to an ingredient (in this case it is name: "wood") and everything identified by * will later on replaced be for the output. Meaning {wood} will be replaced by the type of the giving log.

For example if we would have a birch log block, its code would be log-birch-ud, so * would stand for birch, therefore the output will be converted from code: "planks-{wood}-hor" to code: "planks-birch-hor".

Converting an ingredient to another item upon crafting

Sometimes you want to keep one or more of the ingredients, but convert them to a different item after crafting. For example, when crafting a honey-sulfur poultice, the player needs a bowl filled with honey, but the bowl is not consumed to craft it. Instead the bowl of honey is turned into an empty bowl. This is accomplished by adding the returnedStack property to the ingredient. This property's value needs to contain a type and code just like the standard ingredient properties. This tells the recipe which item to give the player back.

Continuing with the honey-sulfur poultice example, a bowl of honey as an ingredient looks like "B": { type: "block", code: "bowl-honey" }, but the player would lose the bowl if the recipe were written this way. We need to add returnedStack to the ingredient's properties and indicate which item to replace it with. In this case, the player should receive an empty bowl in place of the bowl of honey returnedStack: { type: "block", code: "bowl-burned" }. This property is placed alongside the type and code properties of an ingredient. Putting it all together:

{
	ingredientPattern: "SBS,_L_",
	ingredients: {
		"L": { type: "block", code: "linen-*" },
		"S": { type: "item", code: "powderedsulfur" },
		"B": {
			type: "block", 
			code: "bowl-honey",
			returnedStack: { type: "block", code: "bowl-burned" }
		}
	},
	width: 3,
	height: 2,
	output: { type: "item", code: "poultice-linen-honey-sulfur", quantity: 4  }
}

Consuming more than one durability per tool

To balance durability consuming, it can be done by adding toolDurabilityCost and isTool. This is recipe for pulverizer pounder:

{
	ingredientPattern: "HL_,CL_,_L_",
	ingredients: {
		"H": { type: "item", code: "hammer-*", isTool: true, toolDurabilityCost: 10 },
		"C": { type: "item", code: "chisel-*", isTool: true, toolDurabilityCost: 10 },
		"L": { type: "block", code: "log-placed-*-ud", name: "wood" }
	},
	width: 3,
	height: 3,
	output: { type: "item", code: "pounder-oak", quantity: 1 }
}

Separating recipes on the same handbook page

Sometimes amount of recipes for one item can become overwhelming, to separate important ones, it can be done by adding recipeGroup. These are recipes for wooden ladder:

{
	ingredientPattern: "S_S,SSS,S_S",
	ingredients: {
		"S": { type: "item", code: "stick" }
	},
	width: 3,
	height: 3,
	recipeGroup: 1,
	output: { type: "block", code: "ladder-wood-north", quantity: 3  }
},
{
	ingredientPattern: "P_P,PSP,P_P",
	ingredients: {
		"P": { type: "item", code: "plank-*" },
		"S": { type: "item", code: "stick" }
	},
	width: 3,
	height: 3,
	output: { type: "block", code: "ladder-wood-north", quantity: 3  }
}

Restricting to a specific class

The recipe can be limited to a specific class. This can be done by adding requiresTrait. This is recipe for sewing kit:

{
	ingredientPattern: "FFS,FF_",
	requiresTrait: "clothier",
	ingredients: {
		"F": { type: "item", code: "flaxtwine" },
		"S": { type: "item", code: "stick" }
	},
	width: 3,
	height: 2,
	output: { type: "item", code: "sewingkit"  }
}

Copying attributes

Some recipes can require to copy attributes. This is can be done by adding copyAttributesFrom. This is recipe for labeled crate:

{
	ingredientPattern: "S,C",
	ingredients: {
		"S": { type: "item", code: "paper-parchment" },
		"C": { type: "block", code: "crate" }
	},
	shapeless: true,
	copyAttributesFrom: 'C',
	width: 1,
	height: 2,
	output: { type: "block", code: "crate", attributes: { label: "paper-empty" }  }
}

Hiding recipes from 'Created by' section from handbook

Some recipes are better hidden, it can be done by adding showInCreatedBy.

{
	ingredientPattern: "H",
	ingredients: {
		"H": { type: "block", code: "hay-normal-ud" }
	},
    showInCreatedBy: false,
	width: 1,
	height: 1,
	output: { type: "item", code: "drygrass", quantity: 8  }
}

Using liquid container as ingredient

Some recipes use liquid containers, such as buckets, bowls or jugs. For single liquid container, it can be done by adding liquidContainerProps to recipe attributes. This is recipe for honey-sulfur poultice:

{
    ingredientPattern: "SBS,_L_",
    ingredients: {
        "L": { type: "block", code: "linen-*" },
        "S": { type: "item", code: "powderedsulfur" },
        "B": { type: "block", code: "bowl-fired" }
    },
    attributes: {
        liquidContainerProps: {
            requiresContent: { type: "item", code: "honeyportion" },
            requiresLitres: 0.25
        }
    },		
    width: 3,
    height: 2,
    output: { type: "item", code: "poultice-linen-honey-sulfur", quantity: 4  }
}

The above liquidContainerProps are stored in the grid attributes, which are shared for all containers in the recipe. This means that it cannot be used for recipes that need multiple liquids. Note that there is some code in BlockLiquidContainerBase to read the liquidContainerProps from the per-ingredient recipe attributes instead of the grid attributes, but the code is incomplete. Specifically, as of version 1.19.8, BlockLiquidContainerBase.OnHandbookRecipeRender still directly reads from the grid attributes.

Also the ucontents cannot be used as an alternative, because the real blocks have a contents attribute instead of ucontents attribute. ucontents is not converted to contents before the recipe matching. So the recipe fails to match because the candidate liquid container has a contents attribute instead of a ucontents attribute. Also the contents cannot be directly entered in the json, because it has the ItemstackAttribute type, which is not parsed from json.

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