Creative Tabs

Creative Tabs

Applies to Utility Nexus Admin 1.2.0 for Minecraft 1.21.1 (NeoForge).

What it does

Sorts the creative inventory tabs alphabetically by the name the player actually sees.

On a large modpack the creative tab bar becomes a wall of unlabelled icons whose order has nothing to do with what is in them. This turns it into something navigable — including for players whose Minecraft language is not English, because it sorts by the translated name.

This is the only feature of this mod that is client-side.

The options

Both under [creative]:

Option	Default	What it does
sortTabsAlphabetically	true	Master switch for the whole feature.
vanillaTabsFirst	true	Keep vanilla tabs at the front in NeoForge's order; sort only mod tabs.

vanillaTabsFirst

This is the interesting one.

Value	Result
true — default	Vanilla tabs stay at the front in NeoForge's own order. Only the mod tabs are sorted.
false	Every tab, vanilla ones included, is sorted alphabetically together.

The default is true and it is the better choice in most packs. Vanilla's tab order is familiar — Building, Decorations, Redstone, Transportation, Miscellaneous, and the rest — and putting Surviving or Tools in the middle of it, before players have learned the bar, is disorienting.

Set it to false only if you want a strictly alphabetical bar and do not mind losing that.

What never moves

The hotbar, search, operator and inventory tabs keep their fixed position. They are functional rather than content tabs, so they stay where they are regardless of the setting.

Sorting by what the player sees

The sort uses the tab name in the player's own language, with that language's collation rules.

This is the part that makes it useful rather than merely alphabetical:

• A Spanish player gets the tabs sorted by their Spanish names, using Spanish collation — so Ñ and accents order where a locale-aware sort puts them, not after Z.
• Collation is not the same as code-point order. Code-point sorting puts accented letters after every ASCII letter; a collation-aware sort does not.

A tab whose name is the same for all languages — an untranslated fallback, for instance — sorts by that fallback string.

Disable it

Set sortTabsAlphabetically = false. There is no command for this one; it is config-only, which is reasonable for a purely cosmetic client-side preference.

No server needed

Clients need the mod for this to take effect, and no server configuration is involved. The setting is per client — one player can have sorted tabs while another does not, on the same server.