Smelter Tools

Overview

Smelter Tools adds one item, the Smelter’s Pickaxe. It targets two repetitive parts of survival mining: waiting for a furnace to turn ore into ingots, and breaking the blocks of one ore vein individually. The pickaxe smelts its own drops and collapses a connected vein in a single break.

The mod registers no blocks, entities, screens, network packets or mixins. It changes only the behaviour of one item it adds.

Smelting mined drops

When the pickaxe breaks a block, each dropped item is looked up in the game’s own smelting and blasting recipes. If a recipe matches, the drop is replaced by its result:

• raw iron, raw copper, raw gold → the corresponding ingot;
• cobblestone → stone, sand → glass;
• ancient debris → netherite scrap;
• any other mod’s ore or block, provided a furnace or blast furnace recipe for it exists in the pack.

Because the lookup uses datapack recipes, no per-mod configuration is needed. Durability is consumed exactly as it would be for a normal break by this pickaxe; the smelting itself costs nothing.

Silk Touch priority

If the pickaxe has Silk Touch, smelting is skipped and the block itself drops, as in vanilla. This keeps Silk Touch builds predictable.

Turning smelting off

Shift + Right-click while holding the pickaxe toggles smelting. With smelting off, the pickaxe drops blocks normally. The state is stored as a data component on the item, shown in the tooltip (“Smelting: on” / “Smelting: off”) and confirmed in the action bar. Vein mining is not affected by the toggle.

Vein mining

Breaking one ore block also breaks the blocks connected to it face-to-face, up to 64 blocks per break. The search follows blocks of the same ore type and treats an ore and its deepslate variant as the same vein, so iron_ore and deepslate_iron_ore collapse together.

Behaviour details:

• Works for every block in the ore tag, not only iron.
• Drops are produced with the pickaxe in hand, so Fortune and the smelting conversion both apply.
• Durability is charged once for the whole vein — one point per block actually broken.
• Creative mode does not lose durability.

Built-in enchantments

The crafting recipe produces the pickaxe with Efficiency II and Unbreaking II already applied. In addition, the mod re-applies them when the item is crafted and keeps them present while the pickaxe is held, so a copy taken from the creative inventory or given by command behaves the same as a crafted one.

These are defaults, not locks: the player can still add or change enchantments at an enchanting table or anvil.

Crafting

Result: smeltertools:smelter_pickaxe with minecraft:enchantments { minecraft:efficiency: 2, minecraft:unbreaking: 2 }. The recipe unlocks when the player picks up raw iron.

The item uses a handheld model with an iron-tier texture; it looks like an iron pickaxe with slightly heated tips.

Availability and build status

Installation: place one jar in the mods folder of a matching Minecraft 1.21.1 instance — smeltertools-1.0.0-neoforge-1.21.1.jar, smeltertools-1.0.0-forge-1.21.1.jar or smeltertools-1.0.0-fabric-1.21.1.jar. There is no configuration file and no command. The NeoForge and Forge jars need nothing besides their loader; the Fabric jar additionally requires Fabric API. The checks so far cover a dedicated-server start with the mod installed; the in-game behaviour of the two newer ports is what players confirm next.

License and sources

Smelter Tools is distributed under the MIT license. The Java sources are bundled inside the mod jar under sources/, and a separate smeltertools-1.0.0-sources.jar is published next to the release. The code can be used, modified and redistributed, including inside closed modpacks, as long as the copyright and permission notice are kept.

Source browser: index.html → Source code.

External links

• Project page and source browser: smelter-tools.pages.dev
• Modrinth listing: the project page where this documentation is linked from.