usefulcauldrons

UsefulCauldrons

Cook meals, dye items, make charcoal, and process materials inside vanilla cauldrons.

For Paper 26.3 and Java 25. No menus, resource packs, client mods, or extra plugins are required.

In game: type /help UsefulCauldrons for the in-game guide. It ends with clickable links to this page and the issue tracker.

Contents

• Quick start
• Stews and soups
• Warm milk and hot chocolate
• Candy
• Wax and honey
• Water, dyeing, and concrete
• Charcoal
• Storage, protection, and limits
• Commands, permissions, and configuration
• Install
• Build from source and publish
• Links and support

Quick start

• Drop ordinary ingredients into the inside of a vanilla cauldron. Recipes run automatically as soon as they match; there is no menu or waiting step except charcoal.
• A water cauldron is used for stews and dye work. Stews require heat and an open top, and consume one water level per batch.
• Dry heated cauldrons cook milk, candy, wax, and honey. Keep the top open for these recipes.
• For charcoal, use a dry heated cauldron with a solid opaque block directly above it.
• Right-click with an empty bowl to collect one bowl-based stew or soup. Right-click with an empty hand to collect one warm milk or hot chocolate.
• Sneak-right-click with an empty main hand to retrieve all remaining ingredients and servings. Keep the required bowls in your inventory before retrieving bowl-based food.

Only ordinary, unmodified items are used as ingredients. Items with custom names, lore, enchantments, or other metadata are not consumed by recipes. A cauldron stores up to 4,096 ingredients. It stores one kind of cooked food at a time; collect the batch before another food recipe can run. Partial recipes and leftovers remain inside.

Ingredients and cooked servings appear as small floating, spinning display entities. They are visual indicators, not dropped items, and cannot be picked up by players, mobs, or hoppers. They are recreated from saved contents after restarts and chunk reloads; they do not contain additional items or keep chunks loaded.

Stews and soups

All stew recipes use water, heat from below, and an open top. Each batch drains one water level and makes two servings. Bowls are used when collecting servings. Ordinary vanilla-style mushroom, beetroot, and rabbit stews do not require blaze powder.

Special food effects are level I unless noted above. Stews restore 6 hunger points and 7.2 saturation except rabbit stew. Pufferfish used in Speedy Stew does not poison the eater. Existing stronger or longer absorption is not shortened.

Suspicious stew keeps the vanilla effect and duration of its flower:

Because matching is immediate, add shared ingredients last when making suspicious stew. For example, add the third ingredient only after deciding not to make mushroom stew. Custom recipes are checked before vanilla recipes when multiple matches complete together.

Warm milk and hot chocolate

Use an empty, dry, heated, uncovered cauldron:

Warm milk removes all active potion effects and blocks new beneficial and harmful potion effects for 6 seconds. It restores no hunger and can be consumed while full. Hot chocolate blocks effects for 8 seconds, grants 1 absorption heart for 30 seconds, and restores 8 hunger points + 9.6 saturation. Its own absorption effect is allowed through the immunity. Both drinks use bowls paid for by the recipe, so collecting them needs an empty hand and does not consume extra bowls.

The chocolate upgrade only works while all four warm-milk servings remain stored. Adding water instead of using an empty pot does not make milk; retrieve unwanted ingredients first.

Candy

Use a dry, heated, uncovered cauldron:

Supported foods: apple, sweet berries, carrot, melon slice, golden apple, glistering melon slice, golden carrot, pumpkin, and chorus fruit. Honey is preferred if the pot has enough honey bottles and sugar at the same time. Finished candy pops out above the cauldron.

Every candy restores 12 hunger points (6 icons) + 14.4 saturation and gives Speed I. Sugar candy lasts 10 seconds; honey candy lasts 20 seconds. Golden apple, glistering melon, and golden carrot add 5 seconds. Candied golden apple also grants Regeneration II for 5 seconds and 2 absorption hearts for 30 seconds. Candied pumpkin looks like pumpkin pie; glistering melon becomes edible; candied chorus fruit does not teleport the player.

Sugar burn: entering a heated cauldron containing sugar starts a 20-second burn. Re-entering refreshes the timer; leaving the pot or entering water does not end it. It deals 2 health points (1 heart) of fire damage per second. Fire resistance and creative/spectator modes prevent the damage; another plugin may cancel it. Milk does not cure this burn, and death clears it. The timer uses real elapsed time, including time offline or while the server is stopped.

Wax and honey

Use an empty, dry, heated, uncovered cauldron:

No blaze powder is required. Outputs pop out above the pot; incomplete ingredients remain stored or can be retrieved. Wax is an item with honeycomb as its actual material and a white-dye appearance. Use it in vanilla candle recipes, copper-waxing recipes, or directly on unwaxed copper blocks. Other vanilla honeycomb recipes can also consume it. It cannot dye water.

Wax is marked as a custom item and cannot be used as the ordinary honeycomb for honey extraction, preventing a wax-to-honey loop. Normal honey bottles can be picked up and dropped into a cauldron for candy.

Water, dyeing, and concrete

An uncolored water cauldron hardens concrete powder or removes dye from leather and wolf armor. Drop the item inside, or right-click while holding it. One water level processes a whole dropped stack; a held item processes one per click. Armor names, enchantments, and damage are preserved.

Drop one ordinary dye into water to give it 64 uses. A different dye replaces the color and resets it to 64 uses; adding the same color again does not waste dye. Retrieve ingredients before changing color. Refilling water does not reset uses.

Supported dyed families include wool, carpets, beds, banners, concrete, terracotta, stained glass and panes, shulker boxes, candles, bundles, harnesses, leather armor, and wolf armor. Concrete powder hardens and recolors in the same operation. Existing item metadata, container contents, and banner patterns are preserved. At zero uses the water becomes ordinary water. Dye operations do not consume additional water levels. Vanilla washing, bottle extraction, and extinguishing cannot bypass the use counter.

Charcoal

Drop eligible fuels into an empty, dry, heated cauldron, then place a solid opaque block directly above it. Keep the heat and cover in place for 60 seconds. Black smoke rises above the cover while cooking; completion makes a hiss and light-gray smoke and ejects charcoal above the cover.

Eligible fuels can cook together, and incomplete groups remain retrievable. Other items are not converted. Removing heat or the cover resets the timer on the next cauldron tick. Unloaded chunks pause processing and are never force-loaded. A cover change that occurs entirely while a chunk is unloaded cannot be observed and therefore may not reset progress.

Storage, protection, and limits

• Contents, dye uses, and charcoal progress are stored in plugins/UsefulCauldrons/contents.yml, saved atomically every second after changes and on normal shutdown.
• An abrupt process or power failure can lose up to the most recent second of progress. Back up the storage file with the world.
• Corrupt or unsupported storage prevents startup rather than silently discarding contents. Resolve the file issue before restarting.
• Cauldrons containing ingredients or servings cannot be broken, exploded, or pushed. Empty them first. Water can be refilled, but extracting or replacing fluid is blocked until contents are removed.
• If another plugin or world editor forcibly replaces a managed pot, stored ingredients and servings are ejected at that location on its next loaded tick.
• Cancelled player interactions and fluid events are respected. Automatic work fires the cancellable CauldronProcessEvent with an operation name and optional entity. Protection plugins must integrate with this event to protect automatic dropped-item processing and entity dyeing; universal protection-plugin compatibility is not implied.

Commands, permissions, and configuration

Install

Requires Paper 26.3 and Java 25.

1. Download the JAR from Hangar.
2. Place it in the server's plugins directory.
3. Restart Paper.

./gradlew build --console=plain

python3 tools/docs/usefulcauldrons.py

./gradlew build publishPluginPublicationToHangar syncAllPluginPublicationPagesToHangar --console=plain -PhangarChangelog="Release notes"

Links and support

• Source code and plugin folder
• Hangar project
• Report a bug or request a feature