Crafting

Almost everything you use in Boxy can be made rather than found. Ore comes out of the ground as rock, food comes off a plant raw, and a sword is planks, sticks, and a bar of something harder. This page covers the machinery of making things: how the grid works, how the furnace works, and what the progression actually looks like once you are past your first pickaxe.

The crafting grid

Open your inventory with I. The 3×3 grid sits inside it. Lay ingredients into the squares and the output slot previews whatever they match; take the output and the ingredients are consumed.

You do not have to know any of the patterns. The Recipes tab in the same window lists what you can currently make and fills the grid for you when you pick something, and R opens the full recipe book for browsing and searching everything the world knows how to make. Learning patterns by heart is optional, not expected.

Recipes come in two shapes. Shapeless recipes only care that the right ingredients are present — position is irrelevant. Shaped recipes need the right arrangement, though the pattern may sit anywhere in the grid as long as its shape is intact; a pickaxe made in the top-left corner is the same pickaxe.

Ingredients are often flexible. A recipe that asks for planks will accept planks from any species of tree, because it is really asking for the plank group. Where a recipe needs one exact item, it will only take that item — if a craft refuses to appear, an over-specific ingredient is usually why.

Tools and tiers

Tools are not interchangeable. Each kind digs its own family of material quickly and everything else slowly:

Pickaxe

Stone, ore, and worked stone. Nothing else will yield them at all.

Axe

Trunks, planks, and wooden construction.

Shovel

Dirt, sand, gravel, and other loose ground.

Hoe

Tills soil into farmland. Not a digging tool.

Sword and spear

Combat. Spears can also be thrown.

Fishing rod

Pulls fish out of open water, which the character sheet logs as its own collection.

Materials form a strict ladder: each tier is faster, tougher, and able to break things the tier below could not. Wood, then stone, then the metals you smelt — iron and its neighbours, then the rarer alloys and gems deeper down. Working through the ladder in order is cheaper than skipping steps, because the tier you have decides how quickly you can gather the tier above it.

Tools show a durability bar instead of a stack count and eventually break. Carry a spare of whatever you rely on before a long mining trip, and keep an eye on the bar before starting a fight.

Furnaces and smelting

Some materials need heat rather than a grid. A furnace takes fuel in one slot and the thing being processed in the other; coal, trunks, planks, and sticks all burn. It cooks raw food into meals and smelts raw ore, sand, and clay into usable material — metal comes out of a furnace as ingots, and ingots are what the armor and tool recipes want.

Later there are better ovens: an alloy furnace combines two inputs into materials a plain furnace cannot make, and an electric furnace does the same job as the basic one but runs on power instead of fuel.

Buckets and liquids

An empty bucket (three iron ingots in a V) picks up a liquid source block; using the full bucket puts it back down somewhere else and returns the empty bucket to you. That is the whole mechanism, and it is how you irrigate a farm, fill a moat, or take a controlled amount of lava somewhere useful.

Liquids in Boxy flow and settle rather than sitting still, so a source placed above a slope will find its way down it. Carry a spare bucket of water when you work anywhere near lava.

Farming and food

Till soil with a hoe, plant seeds or crops on the tilled ground, and wait. Crops need light and generally do better near water. Harvest gives you food, crafting materials such as cotton and wool for cloth, and frequently a quest objective at the same time.

Cooking raw food in a furnace makes it restore more than it did raw, so a farm plus a furnace is the point at which food stops being something you worry about. Keep a stack of the result on your hotbar rather than buried in a chest.

Armor and equipment

There are six equipment slots: head, torso, legs, feet, back, and shield. The four body slots take armor crafted from a single material — wood and leather early, then the metal ingots, and eventually diamond and the rarer metals. The back slot takes a cape or a backpack, made from cotton or wool with leather. Armor only helps while it is equipped, and worn pieces show on your character model.

Armor reduces incoming damage and some pieces also carry resistances — heat protection is the one you will notice first, since standing near lava without it is quickly fatal. As with tools, check durability before committing to something dangerous.

Storage

A chest is eight planks around an empty center and holds far more than you can carry. If you are in a guild, guild chests give the whole guild shared storage — convenient, and worth agreeing on rules for beforehand. Signs are craftable and writable, which is the cheapest way to label a storage room or leave a note on a build.

Whatever you do, do not run at capacity. A full inventory quietly costs you quest rewards and drops.

Machines and power

Late crafting is a small factory. Power is generated by burning fuel, by wind, or by water, moved along wire and split by distributors, and buffered in batteries so that a lull does not stop the line. What it drives:

• Grinder — breaks ore down so that smelting yields more from the same rock.
• Electric furnace and alloy furnace — smelting without babysitting a fuel slot.
• Quarry — digs out a region on its own.
• Autocrafter — repeats a crafting recipe from a supply of ingredients.
• Tool repair — restores durability instead of recrafting from scratch.
• Pipes and injectors — move items between machines and containers so the chain runs unattended.

Machines that hold items have their own menus, and they can be targeted by pipes just like a chest. None of this is required to finish quests or survive; it is what a settled base turns into once gathering by hand stops being the interesting part.