Building But Better Blocks: What the Stonecutter Covers
This guide covers how Building But Better's 250 blocks are reached and which route is faster.
The two routes
- Crafting — 255 recipes
- Stonecutting — 92 recipes
Every block has a crafting recipe; roughly a third also have a cutting recipe. That makes the stonecutter a shortcut rather than a separate system — it saves ingredients, not unlocks.
Why the split matters
Stonecutting converts a parent block into a variant directly. For the 92 blocks it covers, redesigning a wall costs one click. For the other 158, it means gathering ingredients and crafting again.
So the material you choose first has a large effect on how expensive it is to change your mind later.
Six items, and they are not equipment
250 blocks against 6 items. There is no tool, no armour, no ingredient worth stockpiling. Whatever those six items are, they serve the blocks rather than the player.
The furnace does not feature
One smelting recipe in the entire mod. If a block is not appearing where you expect, the stonecutter and the crafting grid are the only two places to look.
Nothing is gated
No worldgen structures, no progression, no unlock. The full catalogue is available from the first crafting table, limited only by the base materials you have gathered.
That makes this mod safe to add to a world in progress: it changes no terrain, competes with no machine, and can be removed again leaving only its blocks behind.
Practical advice
Build a stonecutter before you start any large project with this mod, and prefer the stone families for anything you might revise. For the crafted-only blocks, prototype small before committing to a full wall.
Version
2.0pre4 on Forge, 1.20.1 only.
The numbers, in one place
256 pages. 250 blocks. 6 items. 255 crafting recipes. 92 stonecutting recipes. 1 smelting recipe. 0 structures.
Roughly one crafting recipe per block, with about a third of the catalogue also reachable by cutting. There is no second tier, no upgrade path and no machine.
Comparing the two routes
Stonecutting saves ingredients but unlocks nothing — every one of those 92 blocks also has a crafting recipe. So the cutter is purely an efficiency tool here, not a gate. That is worth knowing because in some mods the cutter is the only route to certain variants; not so in this one.
Why a pre-release matters
The build is 2.0pre4, a pre-release. Block sets in pre-release mods sometimes change identifiers between versions, so a large build made now is worth documenting — if a future release renames a block, knowing which variants you used makes recovery far easier.
Building But Better