Create mod has a neat little feature for printing out schematics (via an cannon that animates block placements, using materials from adjacent chests). The cannon interface allows players to insert a blank book and then the mod writes the materials needed and the number of each material in the book.

Often for these kinds of builds though, I just want to go out and gather all of the raw materials first, then focus on building up the items, and Create mod is really not designed to (nor does it make sense for it to) break these items down into their ingredients.

Given that Create mod's format is simple, human readable, and easily reproducible manually, implementing this idea would also allow players to do things like write out a list of things they'd like their less domesticated and more adventurous buddy to get for them while they're out battling zombies.

The idea would be to stick the book into a slot in the gui and 'upload it' into the calculator which would then break down the list further after you hit calculate.

This seems related to #26

Thanks for report!

Create mod is a really nice mod. Your situation makes sense to me, but the difficulty now is that each recipe accepts no more than 14 inputs. 14 inputs is good enough for most of cases, but not suitable for a variable sized material list. So the issue turns to first providing support for a variable input list, which is a planned feature for a long time. Also, this feature is tightly related to #40.

I need to first find some time to implement that feature, then work on this scenario. So it might take some time for me to do it. I will evaluate this issue again when I'm closer to the target.