How to Make Brass in Minecraft with the Create Mod

Brass is one of the most important crafting materials in the Create mod for Minecraft — and unlike most metals in the game, you can't just smelt it straight from ore. It requires a specific process that sits at the heart of what makes Create unique: mixing two ingredients together using mechanical energy. If you're new to the mod or hitting a wall trying to produce brass at scale, here's exactly how it works.

What Is Brass and Why Does It Matter in Create?

In the Create mod, brass is an alloy — a material made by combining two base metals rather than processing a single ore. It's used to craft some of the mod's most advanced components, including:

• Brass Casing — used in many mid-to-late-game Create machines
• Electron Tubes — essential for sequenced gearshifts and logic-based contraptions
• Deployers, Mechanical Arms, and other automation tools

Without brass, your Create progression hits a hard ceiling. Automated farms, item routing, and complex contraptions all depend on it.

The Two Ingredients You Need

Brass is made by combining:

• Copper Ingots
• Zinc Ingots

Both in a 1:1 ratio — one copper ingot and one zinc ingot produce one brass ingot (or a small batch, depending on your version and configuration).

Copper is available in vanilla Minecraft, found in underground ore deposits. Zinc, however, is a Create-exclusive ore. It generates in the world similarly to iron and copper, so if you haven't found it yet, dig around in the mid-levels of your world — typically between Y=0 and Y=60, though world generation settings can shift this.

Why You Can't Just Smelt Brass

This is where many players get stuck. You cannot craft or smelt brass in a regular Furnace or Blast Furnace. The Create mod intentionally gates brass behind its Mixing mechanic, which requires you to have already built some basic Create infrastructure.

The process forces you to engage with the mod's early-game systems before unlocking mid-game automation — which is by design. 🔧

How to Make Brass: The Mixing Method

To produce brass, you need a Mechanical Mixer set up over a Basin.

Step 1 — Build a Basin

The Basin is a block that holds items and fluids during processing. Craft it using iron ingots arranged in a U-shape (check your in-game recipe viewer like JEI or REI for the exact pattern, as recipes can vary slightly by Create version).

Step 2 — Build a Mechanical Mixer

The Mechanical Mixer sits above the Basin and requires a Whisk as its working head. It must receive rotational force to operate — it won't do anything on its own.

Step 3 — Provide Rotational Power

This is the part that trips up new players. The Mechanical Mixer needs to be powered by a rotational source. Common options include:

• Water Wheel — easy early-game power, requires flowing water
• Windmill — requires building a sail structure but provides more consistent speed
• Hand Crank — works but requires manual input, not ideal for bulk production

The mixer needs to spin at the right RPM (rotational speed). Brass mixing doesn't require a minimum speed threshold in most configurations, but higher speeds process faster.

Step 4 — Add the Ingredients

Place copper ingots and zinc ingots directly into the Basin in equal amounts. Once the Mechanical Mixer is powered and spinning, it will begin processing the materials and output Brass Ingots into the Basin.

You can then extract the brass manually or automate extraction using funnels — another Create component.

Automating Brass Production 🏭

Once you understand the manual process, the natural next step is automation. Brass production can be fully automated using Create's own ecosystem:

A fully automated brass line typically looks like: mine zinc and copper → crush → smelt into ingots → route to Basin → mix → extract brass → store.

The efficiency of this pipeline depends heavily on your power setup, available space, and how many machines you chain together.

Variables That Affect Your Brass Setup

No two Create worlds or players approach this the same way. A few factors that shape your experience:

• Zinc spawn rates — affected by world generation settings and any modpacks that adjust ore distribution
• Available power — a weak early-game power source slows everything down; stronger sources let you run multiple mixers
• Modpack context — many Create-based modpacks (like Create: Above and Beyond or Create: Astral) alter recipes, progression gates, or add additional requirements for brass production
• Version of Create — recipe outputs, machine behavior, and required ratios have shifted across versions (0.4, 0.5, and beyond)
• Performance and chunk loading — large automated contraptions in multiplayer can behave inconsistently if chunks aren't loaded

A Note on Recipe Viewers

Because Create integrates deeply with mods like Just Enough Items (JEI) or Roughly Enough Items (REI), it's worth checking brass recipes directly in-game. These tools show you every valid recipe, the exact machine required, and the ratio — which is especially useful if you're playing a modpack that has tweaked the defaults.

The in-game Ponder system (press W on any Create block in the creative menu) also walks you through how each machine works with short animations, including the Mechanical Mixer. If you're ever unsure about a machine's setup, Ponder is often faster than searching online.

What you build around your brass production — the scale, the power source, the level of automation — ultimately comes down to where you are in your playthrough and what you're trying to build next.