EMI is a revolutionary addon to JEI that I can no longer play the game without. It includes a powerful recipe-tracking system that allows you to not just view individual recipes but visualize the whole chain of recipes needed to craft an item from the materials in your inventory, as well as what materials you are lacking. Although it only allows you to track one recipe at a time, it’s more than powerful enough to replace any crafting calculator type mods you are used to using.

Apart from that, it also includes several features not available in base JEI that you didn’t even know you wanted:

– the ability to mark default recipes and materials for the quick-craft function to prioritize over alternatives

– a highly customizable interface with several convenient views such as one that shows only the items you can currently craft

– Settings that sync across different minecraft installations

– The ability to favorite a specific recipe in addition to items

– The ability to preview the recipe that will be used to craft an item before quick-crafting

– The ability to see all valid items for a given tag laid out nicely rather than cycling through them 1 by 1 like JEI does

– Indicators that show when a crafting ingredient is a tag or leaves something behind in the crafting interface

My only critique is that it lacks a shortcut for enabling tracking mode for a recipe. For something that’s the primary purpose of this mod, it’s a bit tedious to have to open the recipe tree interface and click the magnifying glass every time I want to track a recipe tree.

This is and likely forever will be my favorite recipe mod, and it should be yours too.

Compatible with JEI, almost all JEI plugins, and most add-ons (though in my experience the alternatives built for EMI tend to work better with it) this is a true drop-in replacement.

If the modpack you’re playing doesn’t already have it installed, you likely can simply add it to your mod-list to get the full experience.

So, why switch?

Aside from there being no reason not to given the aforementioned compatibility.

The main feature is the crafting tree, it’s like a crafting calculator that you can easily customize, reads your inventory and the inventory of your chest, and will help you semi-auto-craft your pinned item(s).

I’ll include an image of an example crafting tree for the Dimensional Seed from ATM9, keep in mind that Very Large recipes can cause some lag and start eating up your ram, however, I’m able to view the recipe for the ATM star from the same pack without issue, tho a screenshot would be pointless because it barely fits.

Additionally, it offers so much customization, while the standard layout will look familiar to all modded mc players, you can change the multiple panels to appear wherever you want, personally, I like to keep my “craftables” always available under my favorites.

There are a few features I miss from REI such as drag and drop, and recipe cards, other features like favoriting specific recipes and easy craftables toggles are present. However, it’s very possible I simply missed these options. While the config is clean and navigable, even I still find it overwhelming and there are to this day features I’ve seen others use that I don’t know how to access, really this is my primary critique, I’d almost like a sort of tutorial if I’m being honest, but for a utility all about customization and qol, I don’t think having too many features/config options should detract any points in a review.

While the average player will likely never know or care, I also want to appreciate the customization options when it comes to *resource packs.* I’ve maintained a UI resource pack (Overgrown Flowery GUI) and overhauled all three major recipe viewer mods, and EMI was easiest to work with and gave plenty of space for customization, overall I like the look of EMI the best with or without a resource pack.