Alt-F4 - Advanced Smelting Furnace

The Alt-F4 modification represents a fundamental improvement over the standard Minecraft furnace. It addresses the main issues of the regular furnace and adds numerous useful features for automation and optimization of the smelting process.

Key Advantages

The new furnace is equipped with multiple buffer slots for finished products, preventing fuel loss due to filled output slots. There are also separate buffers for fuel and items to be smelted. One of the key features is experience accumulation - the system stores experience from smelting that can be extracted later, which is particularly convenient for process automation.

Interface and Management

The interface is intuitive and displays the current amount of accumulated experience through a graphical element similar to the player's experience bar. It's important to note that the displayed experience value is rounded down due to the specifics of interaction between the object and the interface.

An experience crystal can be placed in the special slot under the first output slot. If the furnace has accumulated 10 or more experience points, it automatically transfers to the crystal and moves to the output slot.

JEI Integration

All registered recipes are displayed through the JEI mod (Just Enough Items) created by Mezz. The screenshot shows an example with different smelting times - all values are standard by default.

Item Features

The experience crystal visually displays the approximate amount of experience contained within it, and also shows the exact value in the tooltip.

Flexible Configuration

The modification offers extensive customization capabilities through JSON files. All furnace recipes are saved to a JSON file when the game loads for reference, and then read back to populate the advanced furnace's recipe registry. You can add new recipes or modify properties of existing ones by editing the user file. It's important to maintain proper JSON format, otherwise the game may crash.

The items shown in the JEI screenshot were modified by adding these entries to the JSON file:

[
  {
    "modNameInput": "minecraft",
    "stackNameInput": "quartz_ore",
    "metaDataInput": 32767,
    "ignoreInputMeta": true,
    "stackSizeInput": 1,
    "nbtStringInput": null,
    "modNameOutput": "minecraft",
    "stackNameOutput": "quartz",
    "metaDataOutput": 0,
    "stackSizeOutput": 1,
    "nbtStringOutput": null,
    "experience": 0.2,
    "burnTime": 800,
    "toRegister": true
  },
  {
    "modNameInput": "minecraft",
    "stackNameInput": "coal_ore",
    "metaDataInput": 32767,
    "ignoreInputMeta": true,
    "stackSizeInput": 1,
    "nbtStringInput": null,
    "modNameOutput": "minecraft",
    "stackNameOutput": "coal",
    "metaDataOutput": 0,
    "stackSizeOutput": 1,
    "nbtStringOutput": null,
    "experience": 0.1,
    "burnTime": 600,
    "toRegister": true
  },
  {
    "modNameInput": "minecraft",
    "stackNameInput": "redstone_ore",
    "metaDataInput": 32767,
    "ignoreInputMeta": true,
    "stackSizeInput": 1,
    "nbtStringInput": null,
    "modNameOutput": "minecraft",
    "stackNameOutput": "redstone",
    "metaDataOutput": 0,
    "stackSizeOutput": 1,
    "nbtStringOutput": null,
    "experience": 0.7,
    "burnTime": 400,
    "toRegister": true
  }
]

Working with NBT tags requires some skill. Example tag: "{ench:[0:{lvl:1s,id:8s}]}" to add the Depth Strider enchantment level one to an item.

To remove a recipe from the registry, copy the corresponding entry from the reference JSON and change the "toRegister" parameter to false.

Technical Features

In beta release versions 0.2.x for Minecraft 1.7.10 and 1.8.8/9, the recipe registry updates when the world/server starts, not when the game loads, which guarantees capturing all properly registered furnace recipes from other modifications.