Your inventory
There are 45 slots, including the nine hotbar slots. Ordinary resources usually stack to 99. Tools, armor, buckets, saddles, carts and other special equipment occupy single-item slots. Durability and written content belong to the actual stack and follow it through transfers, storage, dropping and saving.
Open E for inventory and the extended library. The category row includes All, Nature, Building, Tools, Resources, Food, Spawn and Machinery. Search narrows items by name. The library may show objects you do not own. In finite modes, recipe assistance must find real ingredients and the correct station.
Hand crafting and a building deck
Your hand grid is 2×2. A building deck provides 3×3 when placed and right-clicked. Four planks in a square make the deck. Two vertically arranged planks make four sticks.
A recipe is a shape. You may move the entire shape within a large enough grid, and asymmetric recipes accept a horizontal mirror. Cells outside the shape must be empty. Putting the right ingredient count in an unrelated arrangement does not work.
Basic recipes accept some related material substitutions: the basic oak-log recipe accepts birch logs; recipes that request oak planks accept pine and redwood planks; basic leaf recipes accept the matching alternate leaves; charcoal can substitute for coal in the older basic recipe family. The later stair/slab recipes require their named material rather than automatically accepting every plank.
Let the library arrange it
Select a craftable library entry to move ingredients from your inventory into the visible grid. Existing grid contents are returned first. If you do not have enough ingredients or enough space to return them, the change is rejected rather than partially consuming things.
Then click the result to take it. Each craft consumes one ingredient from every occupied recipe cell. Shift-clicking the result makes a batch from the quantities already in the grid. Recipe assistance only places one of each required ingredient at a time; add more to those cells if you want a larger batch.
If the result cannot fit on the cursor, make room before taking it. Closing or reloading returns pending grid stacks to inventory, or creates recoverable drops when inventory is full. The cursor and grid are included in autosaves.
Workbenches
A chemical workbench also offers a 3×3 grid and is required for Kevlar weave. Graphene sheets require a refined chemistry bench. The refined bench can also perform the basic Kevlar process. An ordinary building deck cannot perform these two processes merely because its grid is large enough.
Moving stacks efficiently
- Left-click: pick up, swap or merge.
- Right-click: split a stack or place one item.
- Shift-click: move between a container and your inventory.
- Left-drag over compatible cells: share evenly; remainder remains held.
- Right-drag: one item per visited cell.
- Release a held stack outside the panel: drop it into the world.
The offhand is a separate saved equipment slot. F swaps it with your selected hotbar stack. It supports passive carrying and the Twilight crystal; active use currently stays on the main hand.