An Upgradable Chest

Upgradable Chests

A Fabric mod that adds a progression of upgradeable storage chests: Copper → Iron → Gold → Diamond → Netherite. Each tier holds more than a vanilla chest, adds a few quality-of-life tools to its own screen, and higher tiers passively pull in nearby dropped items.

Chest tiers

Every tier is fixed at 9 columns wide (the same width as a vanilla double chest / the player inventory), so the screen never gets wider than the screen it’s rendered on, no matter the resolution or GUI scale. Higher tiers hold more items by adding rows instead of columns, up to a cap of 7 rows — any taller and the screen risks getting clipped by the hotbar at common resolutions/GUI scales (e.g. 1080p fullscreen at the default GUI scale of 4). That’s why diamond and netherite tie on slot count; netherite keeps its edge through the other stats instead.

A vanilla chest holds 27 slots, so every tier here — starting with copper — already beats it.

Upgrading a chest

Chests are upgraded, not crafted from scratch: place the chest you already have in the center of a crafting table, surrounded by 8 of the next tier’s material, to transmute it into the next tier up. The chest’s contents and custom name carry over.

Vanilla Chest  + 8x Copper Ingot    -> Copper Chest
Copper Chest   + 8x Iron Ingot      -> Iron Chest
Iron Chest     + 8x Gold Ingot      -> Gold Chest
Gold Chest     + 8x Diamond         -> Diamond Chest
Diamond Chest  + 8x Netherite Ingot -> Netherite Chest

Because each recipe consumes the previous tier’s chest, reaching netherite means you’ve gone through the whole chain — that’s tracked by the “Fully Upgraded” advancement (Minecraft tab), which unlocks the first time you hold a netherite chest.

Magnet pickup

Iron tier and up passively vacuum nearby dropped items into themselves, similar to a hopper. The pickup radius scales with tier (see table above); copper doesn’t have this yet. It’s checked every 10 ticks rather than every tick to keep it cheap, and reuses vanilla’s own item-insertion logic so it respects existing partial stacks and free space.

Chest screen

Every tier’s screen is drawn procedurally (not from a fixed texture) since none of them fit vanilla’s 9×3/9×6 chest layouts. Above the grid there’s a small toolbar:

• Sort — merges matching item stacks and sorts the grid alphabetically by item ID.
• Deposit — moves everything from your inventory into the chest in one click.
• Search box — dims any slot whose item doesn’t match what you’ve typed, live as you type.

Redstone

Like a vanilla chest, a comparator reading a tiered chest gets a signal based on how full it is.