[1.4] make crafty turtle easier to use

Currently, when I want to use the crafty turtle to craft, I have to clear out the turtle's entire inventory except for the items that are part of the recipe. For example, if I have a dirt block in slot 16 while I am crafting a torch, the crafting will fail. This does not make intuitive sense to me. The crafting area is correctly populated and my selected slot has room for the torches, so why would a completely unrelated slot interfere with the process?

Let crafting succeed even if the non-crafting slots have items in them.

Cause the crafting area in turtles is defined as 4x4, thus your recipe does not match :3

Thanks for your clarification. It wasn't obvious to me that the crafting area was 4x4. Additionally, the wiki had some misinformation about how crafting works.

I think my suggestion still has merit, though. I'll rephrase it.

Make only the upper left 3x3 area a crafting area. The remaining 7 slots can be used as a "scratch area" for holding intermediary ingredients, etc.

Hm I wonder - the 4x4 is kinda interesting
Dan could add recipes that are only craftable by turtles?

This could be solved by making the turtle have two separate storage areas - one being the 9 slot crafting area, the other being the storage area, with slightly less slots.

How about instead of having an actual inventory area, we simply define which inventory slots will go to each area of a crafting recipe? For example if I have stick in slot 1, and coal in slot 2, I would do turtle.craft(2,0,0,1). 0 being empty, and simply assuming that everything else is empty after the last argument. Or perhaps an additional argument at the beginning to specify the number of times to craft the recipe, so it would look like turtle.craft(1,2,0,0,1) to craft 1 set of torches. In this way the turtle can hold more stuff without impacting the ability to craft. (After all, the crafting table is a seperate attachment from the inventory. The inventory is on the back of the turtle, the crafting table is on the right.)