Upgradable Gaps
Enchanted golden apples, once known as notch apples, have been uncraftable in survival Minecraft for years. Mojang removed the recipe and left players with nothing but dungeon loot and luck. Upgradable Gaps brings that recipe back in a form that fits modern Minecraft: a golden apple surrounded by a full stack of gold ingots in every outer slot of a crafting table.
This add-on is built for server owners and survival players who miss the old notch apple grind. It works across a huge range of Minecraft versions, from the ancient 1.3.2 era all the way up to 26.3, and it runs on Fabric, Quilt, Ornithe, Forge, NeoForge, and every Bukkit-based server platform including Spigot, Paper, Purpur, and Folia.
What Upgradable Gaps Actually Does
The core idea is simple. Place 8 gold ingots in each of the 8 outer slots of a crafting table, with a golden apple in the center. That is 64 ingots plus the golden apple's own 8, for the same 72 ingots worth of gold as the original notch apple recipe. The result is one enchanted golden apple.
The vanilla golden apple recipe stays completely untouched. Nothing overrides or edits it, and the two recipes cannot collide because this one uses a golden apple in the center rather than a plain apple. Batch crafting also works: stack golden apples in the middle, add 8 ingots per apple in each outer slot, then shift-click the result to craft several at once.
Why This Needs 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 8 ingots, not 64, and there is no JSON setting that changes it.
So every build of Upgradable Gaps does the same two things: when the grid matches, it puts the enchanted apple in the result slot and sends it to the player; when the player takes it, it removes 8 ingots from each outer slot instead of one. How it hooks in depends on the platform. Modern loaders use Mixin, Forge 1.13.2 through 1.15.1 uses JS coremods, older Forge versions use a registered recipe plus crafting events, and the plugin cancels the click on the result slot and performs the craft itself.
Supported Versions and Loaders
- Fabric and Quilt: Minecraft 1.14 to 26.3, any Fabric Loader 0.14 or newer, no Fabric API required
- Ornithe: Minecraft 1.3.1 to 1.13.2 using the Fabric Loader on old versions
- Forge: Minecraft 1.3.2 to 26.3, skipping versions Forge itself never shipped
- NeoForge: Minecraft 1.20.2 to 26.3
- Bukkit, Spigot, Paper, Purpur, Folia: Minecraft 1.7.10 to 26.3 with one jar for all
If you would rather skip the manual setup, the foxygame.net launcher carries Upgradable Gaps in its add-on catalog and handles the correct jar for your Minecraft version automatically, so there is no guessing about loaders or build numbers.
How to Install Upgradable Gaps
Installation is straightforward for every platform. Drop the jar for your server and Minecraft version into the mods folder, or the plugins folder for the Bukkit plugin, then restart the server. Jars are named upgradable-gaps-version+platform-mcversions.jar, so the filename tells you exactly what you are getting.
A few platform notes are worth remembering. Forge 1.15.2 needs Forge 31.2.44 or newer because that was the first build with Mixin. Forge 1.3.2 through 1.7.10 servers turn vanilla clients away, so players need Forge installed, though they do not need this mod. Forge 1.3.2 through 1.5.2 has one jar per Minecraft version, and Forge 1.7.2 only starts on Java 7, with a single jar covering both 1.7.2 and 1.7.10.
When you download Upgradable Gaps for Minecraft, keep in mind that everything here is server-side. Players need nothing extra, with the exception of those very old Forge versions, and it obviously works in single-player worlds too.
Things Worth Knowing Before You Play
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 8 ingots and then fail to craft. It works fine arranged by hand, so tell your players about it.
Crafter blocks will not make enchanted golden apples either. A Crafter consumes exactly one item per slot and resolves recipes through the recipe manager, which knows nothing about this pattern. That is deliberate, since letting it through would let a Crafter produce notch apples for 8 ingots and a golden apple. Other auto-crafting mods behave the same way for the same reason. The recipe also ignores the doLimitedCrafting game rule and stays craftable, because there is no recipe entry for a player to unlock.
Vanilla clients see a one-frame flicker of the input slots when crafting, since their local prediction assumes one ingot per slot and the server's correction arrives a tick later. It is cosmetic only, and the server stays authoritative.
Tuning and Customization
If 64 ingots feels too steep or too cheap, the INGOTS_PER_SLOT constant controls the cost. It lives in each source tree, including the Upgrade class in modern/src/common and its counterparts in ornithe/, forge-legacy/, and bukkit/. Both the match and the consumption read from it, so they always stay in step. Change it everywhere and rebuild.
Upgradable Gaps fills a gap that vanilla Minecraft has left open for years, and it does so without breaking vanilla clients, without touching the existing golden apple recipe, and without forcing players to install anything on their side. For survival servers that want the notch apple back, that combination is hard to beat.