First of all, I would like to say I love your mod, its those kind of mods that make modpackt truly great to play and enjoyable to make!

I want recipes to damage multiple items during the craft. I would also like multiple items to remain in the crafting grid after crafting (so their presence is required but they are not consumed)

Here's a concrete use-case: to craft a fence you'll need a shapeless recipe of 2 planks, 2 sticks, a crafting-flint (just a flint with durability) and a mallet. Both the crafting flint and the mallet should take damage.

Now as to why it has to be in an Artis table, vanilla recipes aren't shared so the table itself can be used as a progression lock.

My suggestion is as follows:

• Allow a configurable number of catalyst slots in the table (which would be already be awesome in and of itself)
• Provide a way to specify a catalyst as a remainder (so it is required but not consumed)

Here's how I personally see this:

{
  "type": "artis:workstump_shapeless",
  "ingredients": [
    {
      "item": "minecraft:oak_planks",
      "count": 2
    },
    {
      "item": "minecraft:stick",
      "count": 2
    },
  ],
  // Catalyst becomes a list for each catalyst slots
  "catalysts": [
    {
      "item": "minecraft:flint",
      // The zero cost means none is consumed but it is required
      "cost": 0
    },
    {
      "tag": "forgero:wooden_mallet",
      "cost": 3
    }
  ],
  "result": {
    "item": "minecraft:oak_fence"
  }
 } 

An other option I think would work very well is having catalysts use an action field.

"catalysts": [
  {
    // Damages the item, requires the item to have durability
    "action": "damage",
    "item": "halstein:crafting-flint",
    "cost": 3
  },
  {
    // Consumes an item with durability rather than damage it
    "action": "consume",
    "tag": "c:axes",
    "cost": 1
  }
]

The reason I think this would work well is that it would open the door much more easily to custom catalyst actions from mods, like that energy-draining example!

There are those various thoughts! I'll be using your mod for my (very excruciating as demonstrated by the fence recipe) modpack!

High quality suggestion, ty!