Create Wiki · Fluids
Item Drain
The Item Drain does the opposite of the Spout: it empties items that hold a fluid. A lava bucket placed on it leaves its lava behind and comes out empty. At the end of a Mechanical Belt, it empties buckets one after the other, and a pump collects the fluid from its internal tank.
Quick facts
- Category
- Fluids
- Crafting
- Iron Bars + Copper Casing
- Tank
- 1,500 mB
- Emptying
- 20 ticks (1 second) per item
- Passage
- The item moves 1/8 of a block per tick and leaves on the opposite side
- Pipes
- On the sides and from below, not from above
- Items emptied
- Buckets, honey bottles, potions, and any item holding a fluid
- Version
- Create 6.0.8 · Minecraft 1.21.1
Crafting table recipe
→ 1 Item Drain
Emptying items
The Item Drain is a low block with a grate on top. It takes one item at a time, extracts the fluid it holds and keeps it in its 1,500 mB tank. You can see the liquid rise under the grate. The emptied item, bucket or bottle, then leaves on the other side.
Pouring by hand
Right-clicking the drain with a full item pours its contents in: a lava bucket leaves its 1,000 mB and comes back empty in your hand. It is the easiest way to put fluid into a network by hand, since a Fluid Tank refuses buckets in Survival.
From the side
An item arriving from the side, from a belt or a funnel, rolls onto the grate. It moves an eighth of a block per tick to the centre, stops there for 20 ticks, one second, while it empties, then carries on. Only one item is on the drain at a time; the next one waits on the belt.
Out the other side
Once emptied, the item leaves through the side opposite its entry. If a belt, a depot or another drain waits there, it moves onto it; if that side is open, it is thrown onto the ground. Drains in a row can empty items that hold several doses.
Collecting the fluid
A Mechanical Pump connected to the drain pulls the fluid from its tank and sends it into a Fluid Tank. Pipes connect on the sides or from below, never from above, where the grate is. When its tank is full, the drain stops and holds the next item back.
What it is for
The Item Drain collects lava from a cauldron farm, empties honey bottles from a bee farm, or recovers the fluid of items you bought or looted, such as milk buckets from a cow or potions from a dungeon chest. Together with a Spout, it moves a fluid from one kind of container to another: buckets emptied on one side, bottles filled on the other.
Common mistakes
A drain that keeps a full bucket is usually a full drain: check that the pump turns and the tank has room. An item that holds no fluid simply rolls across without stopping, so a mixed belt can go through without being sorted first. A tank that already holds another fluid refuses the drain's one: empty it, or send each fluid to its own tank with a Smart Fluid Pipe. And a pipe placed on top of the grate does not connect to it.
Drains in a row
Item Drains placed end to end hand items to each other: a bucket enters the first one, empties, slides into the second, and so on. This helps to empty items holding several doses, or to spread the load over several tanks. At the end of the line, a belt or a funnel collects the empty containers, ready to travel back to a Spout.
Related pages
Sources for the numbers (Create 6.0.8 code)
- Recipe: crafting/kinetics/item_drain.json
- Tank: ItemDrainBlockEntity, SmartFluidTankBehaviour.single(1,500 mB)
- Passage: ItemDrainBlockEntity.tick (itemMovementPerTick = 1/8, FILLING_TIME = 20, exit on the opposite side or thrown as an entity)
- Connection: FluidPropagator.hasFluidCapability (no connection from above)
- Scene: DrainScenes.emptying; buckets simulated on the belt and drain, level drawn after ItemDrainRenderer
Original texts and animations by Create France, rendered from the mod's Ponder scenes. Create is a mod by the Create Team, not affiliated with Create France.