Ten trips back from a mine and the chest by your door is a mess of cobblestone, seeds, iron and half-stacks of dirt. Inventory Sorting fixes that with one click: it merges partial stacks and lines items up in a fixed order, in the chest you have open or in your own inventory. The files on this page are Inventory Sorter for Fabric, the small mod started by kyrptonaught and now maintained by meza, covering Minecraft 1.14.4 to 1.21.4.
Players who remember Inventory Tweaks often come looking for it here. That mod’s own page says it is unmaintained and stops at 1.12.2, so on modern Fabric this is the lightweight replacement for its sorting half.
Four ways to sort
You do not have to aim for the tiny button every time. With default settings in the 1.9.x builds, any of these works:
- The sort button. A small button sits at the top right of the open container, and a second one appears for your player inventory.
- Middle-click on a slot sorts the inventory that slot belongs to.
- Double-click a slot to do the same, which helps on laptops without a middle button.
- The P key sorts whichever half of the screen your mouse is over, chest or inventory. Rebind it in Options, Controls under the Inventory Sorting category.
There are chat commands too: /invsort sort sorts the container you are looking at and /invsort sortme sorts your own inventory.
Changing the sort order
The old description of this mod said that clicking the button again cycles the filter. It does not: each click just sorts. To change the order, hover over the sort button and scroll the mouse wheel. The tooltip shows the current mode:
- Name, the default, alphabetical by item name.
- Category follows the creative menu tabs, so building blocks, tools and food end up in separate groups.
- Mod groups items by the mod that adds them, which is the most useful order in big packs.
- Id sorts by internal item ID.
By default, sorting a chest leaves your own inventory alone. If you want both sorted together, turn on “Sorting also sorts player inv” in the settings.
Containers that should stay untouched
Some modded machines use slots for specific inputs, and sorting them would shuffle fuel into an ore slot. The mod handles this with two lists in config/inventorysorter/blacklist.json5: one disables sorting for a screen, the other only hides the buttons. You rarely need to edit the file by hand. Turn on debug mode in the settings, hold Left Ctrl and click the sort button inside the problem container, and the chat offers clickable links that add it to either list.
The settings screen itself opens from the Mods list, which on Fabric means installing Mod Menu. Without it, the defaults above still apply.
Server or single-player
Sorting is done by the game’s server side, so in single-player it simply works. On a multiplayer server the mod has to be installed on the server as well, or the button does nothing. The current 2.x and 3.x releases by meza go further and can sort for players with no mod at all, but they need Cloth Config on the client for the buttons. We keep the classic 1.x line here, which has no extra library beyond Fabric API.
Installing on Fabric
- Install Fabric Loader for your Minecraft version and the matching Fabric API; the mod will not start without it.
- Pick the file for your exact version. The newest here, 1.9.1, is for 1.21.4.
- Place it in the mods folder and launch. Open a chest: the sort button in its top right corner confirms the mod is loaded.
The very old 1.14 to 1.16 files predate some of the settings described above, so expect fewer options there.
Good companions
- Inventory HUD+ shows your inventory, armor and effects on screen while you play. A Forge build exists too.
- Inventory Pause stops time in single-player while an inventory screen is open, so sorting a chest at night is safe.
- AppleSkin adds hunger and saturation values to food tooltips, useful once your food is grouped in one chest.
