At the moment, crafters have the "keep" and "all" consumption modes, which respectively retain one item per input or consume all inputs. The problem, however, is that the "keep" mode doesn't work well for retaining components to recipes that contain some kind of non-consumed and unstackable "catalyst" (e.g. harvestcraft cookware recipes).

I propose the addition of a new "keep-multi" consumption mode which causes all items with max stack size > 1 to be retained while still allowing recipes to be executed with items of stack size = 1.

Or, maybe, have the crafters look ahead of the crafting operation and see what's kept, and if an item in the grid is not consumed or damaged, it'd ignore that in the "keep" requirement.