A block that allows you to specify several things you wish to craft, and gives you a list of required materials, perhaps has a chest like storage that allows you to drop resources in until you have everything you need!

+1

So sort of like a RP2 project table with a plan, right?

Not exactly. It will break down items into their crafting components so you can take inventory and know exactly what you'd need to craft them.

What hasn't been addressed is how to deal with recursive recipes. I briefly touched on the topic in IRC.

At this point, it seems that you want to imitate recursive autocrafters, like what Applied Energistics provides. Granted, for AE the player has to provide all the recipes, and here it sounds like the machine should predict what the ingredients should be.

Both recursive and alternate recipes will be an issue, as well as recipes that can only be solved with another machine that is not basic crafting.

👍

Closing this as it's months old. If it needs revisiting we can open a new bug.

It should work similar to a GPS unit, if you go off course, it then picks a better route. If you put items in there that don't match a certain recipe but much another recipe, it will change.

On a side note, some kind of GPS unit could be fun I don't know what itd do.

You could use it to find the fastest way out of a cave, or it could lay
"breadcrumbs" so you could find your way out of a tough spot.

Or perhaps it could work like a compass, except it would store locations
other than spawn.