Dispenser cant crafted

i did noticed two usernames in smp3 cant craft it. And i decided to give it a try and it wont be crafted. i think it related to missing villagers, and other mobs. Let me know if it fix or not. thanks

Thanks for posting this WildHorse1989. I stumbled onto this, on smp3. I told Breezyman about it and he came to check it out, but it suddenly started working, making me look like a fool. As soon as he left, it stopped working again. I made a recording of this happening, but I doubt it'll be of any use, beyond being proof that it is actually happening, and I'm not just going mad. Out a dozen clicks onto the craft table, I was only able to get one hit where it allowed me to make the dispenser.

Use F3+h to toggle detailed item descriptions, and see if the bow you're using has any NBT tags, possibly from being repaired or dropped from a mob, or what-have-you. Try simply crafting a fresh bow the normal way and using it to craft a dispenser; that should work.

Yeah, I always have the detail descriptions active, to make it easier to make sell signs. They were all showing the same info. For the sake of testing, I've just gone through and combined a bunch of bows on the craft table (fixing them) and then used them to make dispensers. Whatever was causing the issue seems to be gone now.

One thing I forgot to mention was that the dispenser would appear momentarily in the crafted spot on the table, but would vanish before I could manage to click on it.

Gawd, another one of those 'It happens when you don't want it to happen, and it doesn't happen when you do want it to happen'

Any chance that a renamed item found its way into your recipe? Even if you renamed the item back then it still loses its ability to be used sometimes. This becomes specifically noticeable if you rename a block of iron, then rename it back (delete the name in the anvil and take it out) and then try to get ingots out of it: you'll get the exact behavior as you're describing here.

So I can't help wonder if that could have been an issue here as well.

Okay... I checked back through the bows I had been trying, and had fixed myself, but none of them had the NBT note on them. So I went back and watched my video and realized that the ones I had been trying to use were the ones I ended up tossing to Sara, so she could try to craft the dispensers, and that they did have the NBT note on them. So what does the "NBT" stand for and how did it get there, when the other bows I had fixed didn't have it?

Note: not too clear minded at the time of writing.

NBT is a data format which is used by Minecraft to add additional information to an in-game object. Quote from the (Minecraft) wiki:

So put simple: extra info on a Minecraft item.

The real question is how it got there.

That's one thing I may know, now that I've done some testing.

For whatever reason it doesn't seem to happen on the craft table, but if you combine two bows (one being normal and the other being named) on an anvil, it creates an undamaged bow, but tacks on the NBT tags. So as the others were saying, that tag was keeping use from using them in the crafting and I simply overlooked it being there, because as far as I was concerned, "undamaged bow was undamaged". So, at some point, Sarae must've combined some bows on an anvil (or maybe one of her kids) and mixed them in with the brand new ones she had, causing us to have mixed results while we were trying to craft.

Here's what did to get a bow with the NBT tag:
(click image to enlarge)