Get It Together, Drops! guide for All the Mods 10 0.51

Get It Together, Drops! is a small quality-of-life and performance mod that adds tags and configuration options defining how dropped items combine on the ground. Instead of leaving dozens of separate item entities lying around, nearby drops merge into single stacks, which can significantly improve performance in areas with lots of dropped items like explosion craters or farms.^[1]

This pack ships version 1.3.2 of the mod, and it has been part of the pack since 0.32 or earlier, so it has been quietly cleaning up your item drops the whole time you have been playing.^[2]

Who it is for

You do not craft anything with this mod and you never interact with it directly. It is for anyone who mines, farms or blows things up at scale, which in a pack like this is basically everyone. It is especially handy on servers: the mod can be installed server-side without requiring players to install it, and it works just as well in singleplayer.^[1]

Where it fits in progression

There is no progression here. The mod has no items, no recipes and no quests in this pack, and it is not on the ATM Star path. Think of it as background infrastructure that makes your big mining trips and mob farms smoother rather than something you work toward.^[1]

What you can tune

• radius controls how large an area a dropped item searches for other drops to combine with, from 0.5 to 500. Setting it to 5.0 searches 5 blocks in all directions around the item, and 0.5 is vanilla behaviour. Note that this search does not take walls into account.^[1]
• checkY decides whether dropped items also check above and below themselves. False is vanilla behaviour.^[1]
• The item tag getittogetherdrops:do_not_combine stops the listed items from combining at all.^[1]
• The item tag getittogetherdrops:ignored makes the mod skip those items entirely so they fall back to vanilla behaviour, and it takes precedence over do_not_combine.^[1]

Unverified The exact radius and checkY values this pack uses are not confirmed by the available sources, so check the config in your world's serverconfig folder if you want to know the current settings.

Good news: there is nothing to craft here. This mod adds no items, blocks or machines, it only adds tags and configuration options that control how dropped items combine on the ground. That means your "first steps" are about knowing what it does for you rather than building anything.^[1]

The point of it is performance. Normally dropped items only merge when they are practically on top of each other, so an explosion crater or a busy farm can leave hundreds of separate item entities lying around. This mod widens that search so nearby drops clump together instead, which can significantly improve performance in exactly those spots.^[1]

What it does behind the scenes

• A radius setting defines how large an area a dropped item searches for other drops to combine with. It accepts values from 0.5 to 500, where 0.5 is vanilla behaviour, and a value of 5.0 means it searches 5 blocks in all directions around the item.^[1]
• A checkY setting decides whether drops also look above and below themselves. Setting it to false is vanilla behaviour.^[1]
• Two item tags give finer control: getittogetherdrops:do_not_combine stops the listed items from combining at all, and getittogetherdrops:ignored makes the listed items fall back to vanilla behaviour. The ignored tag takes precedence over do_not_combine.^[1]

It is a server-side mod: it can be installed on a server without players needing it on their client, and it works in singleplayer too. On Forge in 1.15 and newer, the mod's config settings live in the serverconfig folder inside your world's folder, so each world carries its own copy.^[1]

Unverified The exact radius and checkY values this pack ships with could not be confirmed from the available sources. Open the mod's config in your world's serverconfig folder if you want to see or change what the pack uses.

There are no machines or multiblocks here. Get It Together, Drops! is a pure behaviour tweak: it adds tags and configuration options that define how dropped items combine into stacks on the ground. The whole point is performance, since areas with lots of loose items, like explosion craters or farms, are where entity counts get painful.^[1]

In vanilla, a dropped item only merges with other drops in a very small area around itself. This mod widens that search, and this pack turns it up well past vanilla.^[1][3]

How the merge search works

Every dropped item looks around itself for other dropped items to combine with. Two settings control that search, and both live in the server config for the mod.^[1][3]

• radius is the size of the area, in blocks, that a dropped item searches in all directions for other drops. It accepts values from 0.5 to 500.0, where 0.5 is vanilla behaviour. This pack sets it to 2.^[1][3]
• checkY decides whether drops also check above and below themselves. False is vanilla behaviour, and this pack sets it to true.^[1][3]

Put together, that means a drop in this pack sweeps a 2-block radius horizontally and vertically instead of vanilla's half-block bubble. So the scattered stacks from a mob farm, a big tree, or a blast tend to collapse into far fewer item entities before you ever walk over to pick them up.^[1][3]

Tag control per item

If a specific item should not follow the global rules, the mod exposes two item tags that override the config behaviour.^[1]

• getittogetherdrops:do_not_combine: items in this tag do not combine at all.^[1]
• getittogetherdrops:ignored: items in this tag are ignored by the mod entirely and fall back to vanilla merging behaviour. This tag takes precedence over do_not_combine.^[1]

Where the config lives

These are server-side settings. On Forge in 1.15 and newer, the mod's config settings are found in the serverconfig folder inside your world's folder. The mod can be installed on a server without players needing it on their clients, and it works the same in singleplayer.^[1]

Unverified The exact timing of the merge check, how it interacts with item pickup delay, and whether it merges items with different NBT are not covered by the available sources.

This mod only has two config options, and both control how dropped items merge on the ground. Both live in the server config file, and the pack changes both of them away from vanilla behavior. That makes item piles in explosion craters and farms combine more aggressively than you'd normally see.^[1][3]

• radius is set to 2 in this pack. It is the distance in blocks that a dropped item searches around itself for other items to combine with. The allowed range is 0.5 to 500, and 0.5 is vanilla behavior, so the pack's search area is wider than vanilla.^[1][3]
• checkY is set to true in this pack. This makes dropped items also look above and below themselves when searching for items to merge with. False is vanilla behavior, so the pack changes this too.^[1][3]

Item tags for specific items

The mod also has two item tags for controlling individual items. Items in getittogetherdrops:do_not_combine never combine at all. Items in getittogetherdrops:ignored are left alone by the mod and fall back to vanilla behavior. The ignored tag takes precedence over do_not_combine.^[1]

Unverified The sources don't say which items, if any, the pack puts in these two tags, so check them in-game before relying on them.

There isn't much version history to tell for Get It Together, Drops!, and that's fine for a small mod. All the Mods 10 0.51 ships version 1.3.2, and the mod has been in the pack since 0.32 or earlier.^[2]

• 1.3.2 (the version in 0.51): fixes an error that happened when stopping a dedicated server.^[2][4]

The sources include no pack changelog entries for this mod, so I can't tell you about changes to it between pack releases beyond the version above.^[2]