Engraver Block

What is the Engraver good for, and how do you use it?

The following text will guide you through all that.

It'll teach you how you can create an item that is totally unique, something only you can recreate, and even has Lore, aka custom tooltip text.

This is the GUI of the engraver block.

On the top there are 2 input slots.

The left input slot can only hold 1 item. This item will act as the template of the data you want to engrave.

The right input slot is the item you actually want to engrave.

Engraving an item can sometimes create new items (like a passport or a written data card), but mostly just adds hidden NBT data to plain items.

The bottom slot is the output slot, and it acts the same as the regular crafting table output slot.

To engrave an item, you first have to create a Data Card.

You can do this by putting the Empty Data Card in the right input slot, and the item you want to use as the template (in this case an apple) in the left input slot.

Now the output will show you a Data Card, along with the data it actually contains.

(This data is just text, your apple does not get stored on a data card)

You can keep on engraving the same Data Card, the info will just be added to it.

So you made your Data Card/template, now what?

To actually engrave an item, you put the Data Card in the first slot, and the item you want to engrave in the second slot.

Now I can hear you think:

But the output item has no extra text, it's exactly the same!

That is correct. The simple items you engrave onto an item like this will stay hidden, but the output item is actually totally unique. In this case it will not stack with a regular Iron Ingot.

This can be useful for creating items that can't be forged, like Keys or coins.

(Unless they know the items used in the Data Card template, but that can be remedied too! I'll explain later)

Before we can make something nobody else can recreate, we have to make a Passport.

This is the easiest Engraving recipe available: just put an Empty Data Card in the second slot and you'll get your own passport.

Nobody else can make this.

A Passport is a type of Data Card on its own.

So you can immediately use it as a template, and this template will add some visible text to the item.

But what you actually want to use it for, is to add it to your earlier Data Card/template.

This will make the Data Card only usable by you, and nobody else. When you use it to engrave an item, the item will also remember you as the engraver. This makes the item even more unique, and nobody else can recreate it.

So now you know how to add ownership to an item or Data Card. You also know how to add hidden data, just to make something more unique.

When you don't know yet is how you can actually add Lore to an item.

Lore is what Minecraft calls the purple text that is added to the tooltip.

It's very simple to do: rename a piece of paper in an anvil, and engrave that onto your Data Card/template.

It'll show up on the tooltip of the Data Card too. You can also add multiple lines of lore.

When we actually use this template on an item, the lore will look like this.

It will of course also contain the hidden item data + the ownership information.

So this key is now totally unique.

Even if someone else created a similar key, with similar lore & item data, it will never be the same key because it won't have the correct engraver data.