Upgradable Gaps
Enchanted golden apples have always been one of Minecraft's most coveted items, and for good reason. They grant Absorption, Regeneration, Fire Resistance, and Resistance all at once, making them a lifesaver in PvP, boss fights, and dangerous exploration. The problem is that Mojang removed the original crafting recipe years ago, leaving players dependent on rare loot chests. Upgradable Gaps solves that problem cleanly by restoring a balanced way to craft them again.
What Upgradable Gaps Does
This mod adds a single, focused recipe: place eight gold ingots in each of the eight outer slots of a crafting table and a golden apple in the center. That consumes a full stack of gold ingots per outer slot, for a total of 64 ingots plus the eight already baked into the golden apple, matching the old notch apple recipe's 72-ingot gold cost. The result is one enchanted golden apple.
The recipe is deliberately expensive. It respects the original game's economy by demanding serious gold investment, so it does not trivialize survival progression. If you have been stockpiling gold from a mesa biome or a zombie farm, this is finally a worthwhile sink for it.
Why a Mod Instead of a Data Pack
Vanilla crafting simply cannot express "a stack of items in one slot." An Ingredient in recipe JSON has no count field, and the result slot removes exactly one item from every filled slot. A data pack recipe asking for gold ingots around a golden apple would cost eight ingots, not 64, and no JSON option changes that. Upgradable Gaps works around the limitation at the code level, hooking into the crafting grid update and the result slot so that taking the output removes eight ingots from each outer slot instead of one.
Supported Versions and Loaders
Upgradable Gaps for Minecraft covers an unusually wide range of platforms, which makes it easy to fit into almost any server setup:
- Fabric and Quilt: Minecraft 1.14 through 1.21.x, with any Fabric Loader 0.14 or newer. No Fabric API required.
- Ornithe: Minecraft 1.3.1 through 1.13.2, using Fabric Loader installed through the Ornithe installer.
- Forge: Minecraft 1.3.2 through 1.21.x, skipping versions Forge itself never shipped.
- NeoForge: Minecraft 1.20.2 and newer.
- Bukkit, Spigot, Paper, Purpur, and Folia: one plugin jar covering 1.7.10 onward.
Because everything is server-side, players on a vanilla client can join without installing anything, with the exception of very old Forge versions where Forge servers turn vanilla clients away. Single-player worlds work perfectly too.
How to Install
Installing is straightforward. Download Upgradable Gaps for your server and Minecraft version, then drop the jar into your mods folder, or into plugins for the Bukkit-based plugin build, and restart the server. Jars follow the naming pattern upgradable-gaps-version+platform-mcversions.jar, so matching the right file to your setup takes only a moment.
A few platform notes are worth remembering. Forge 1.15.2 needs Forge 31.2.44 or newer because that is the first build with Mixin support. Forge 1.3.2 through 1.5.2 requires one jar per Minecraft version, since Forge that old loads mods by obfuscated names. Forge 1.7.2 only starts on Java 7, and a single jar covers both 1.7.2 and 1.7.10.
If you would rather skip manual file juggling entirely, the foxygame.net launcher offers a one-click install path for Upgradable Gaps, pulling the correct build for your exact Minecraft version and loader automatically. That same launcher keeps add-ons updated in the background, so you never have to hunt down a new jar after a game update.
Things Worth Knowing
The recipe does not appear in the recipe book, and that is a hard vanilla limit. The recipe book renders one item per slot with no count, and its click-to-fill places one item per slot, so an entry would fill the grid with eight ingots and then fail to craft. Arranging the pattern by hand works fine, so let your players know the layout.
Batch crafting works well: stack golden apples in the center with eight ingots per apple in each outer slot, then shift-click the result to craft several at once. The vanilla golden apple recipe remains completely untouched, and the two cannot collide because the center item differs.
The recipe intentionally does not work in a Crafter block, since a Crafter consumes exactly one item per slot and resolves recipes through the recipe manager. Allowing it would let a Crafter produce notch apples for eight ingots and a golden apple, which would break the balance entirely. Other auto-crafting mods behave the same way for the same reason.
On 1.13 and newer, no recipe is registered into any registry and no recipe serializer is added. That is what keeps vanilla clients able to join, because since 1.13 the server sends every recipe to every client on login, and a vanilla client cannot decode a recipe type it does not have. Vanilla clients see a one-frame flicker of the input slots when crafting, since their local prediction assumes one ingot per slot, but the server is authoritative and the result is always correct.
Final Thoughts
Upgradable Gaps is a small, well-engineered mod that fills a genuine gap in modern Minecraft. It restores enchanted golden apples to craftable status without cheapening them, supports an enormous span of versions and loaders, and stays fully server-side so nobody needs to install anything on the client. If your server has been sitting on mountains of gold with nothing to spend it on, this is the add-on to grab.