Storage Drawers: never put a filled drawer through the Framing Table

Do not frame a filled drawer

If a Storage Drawer has anything stored inside it, do not run it through the Framing Table. Empty it first, or do not frame it at all. On most versions still in wide use, doing so deletes everything the drawer was holding, with no warning and no recovery inside the game.

This is not a rendering glitch or a cosmetic mismatch. It is item loss, and if the drawer held a stack that mattered, a full chest of ingots, an entire farm's worth of crops, a stockpile you were counting on, it is simply gone.

What the bug looks like

A player on CurseForge described it plainly: "Using the framing table on a drawer with contents inside deletes the contents. Who in their right mind thought that was a good idea? I just lost thousands of items."

That matches the report filed against Storage Drawers' own GitHub repository as issue 1213, opened in February 2025. The steps are simple: place a drawer, put at least one item in it, break it so it drops with its contents intact, then run it through the Framing Table alongside a decorative block. Take the finished framed drawer and place it. The items that were inside before are not inside now.

Why it happens

The Framing Table builds the resulting framed drawer as a new item stack rather than carrying the original one forward. Two places in the mod's code did this: the table's own tile entity built the input stack with a plain copy that keeps the item count but drops other stack data, and the helper that assembles the final framed block built a brand new stack from scratch. Since Minecraft 1.20.5, an item stack's extra data, including whatever the drawer uses to track what is stored inside it, lives in something called a data component. Neither of those two code paths carried that data component across. The count survived. The frame got applied. The drawer's actual contents did not make the trip.

It is fixed, but only on newer versions

A pull request titled "1.21.4 Fix issue where the framing table would remove contents of drawers" was merged into the mod's 1.21.4 branch in June 2025. It swapped both of those plain copies for a method that explicitly preserves an item stack's data components while still changing what item it is. The GitHub issue was closed in August 2025 as fixed. Releases built from that branch and the ones that followed it, up through 1.21.11 as of this writing, carry the fix.

The problem is that the fix was never merged anywhere else. Storage Drawers keeps a separate code branch for each supported Minecraft version, and the patch only touched 1.21.4. The 1.20.1 branch kept shipping updates after that, as recently as September 2025, and nothing in that release history mentions this fix. Since 1.20.1 predates the data component system the fix relies on, its version of the bug would need its own patch even if someone wanted to backport it, and there is no sign anyone has.

That matters because 1.20.1 is still one of the most heavily used versions for Forge and Fabric modpacks. If your pack is on 1.20.1, or on 1.19, 1.18, or anything earlier, do not assume this got fixed just because the GitHub issue is closed. The issue is closed for 1.21.4 and up. It is untested and unconfirmed everywhere else.

The related, older bug

A separate, much older issue on the same tracker, filed in 2019, described framed drawers dropping only a single item and voiding the rest of their contents when broken without packing tape applied first. That one was fixed in early 2020 and is not the same code path as the Framing Table bug above. It is worth knowing about anyway, because it points at the same general weak spot: any operation that turns a filled drawer into a different block or item, whether that is framing it or breaking it, is the moment this mod has historically been most likely to lose what was inside.

What to actually do

Empty a drawer completely before sending it through the Framing Table, on every version, not just the ones known to be affected. If you want a drawer's decorative frame applied before you start filling it, frame it first and store items in it afterward. And if you are running a server or a long-lived world with drawers full of valuable stock, keep a recent backup on hand regardless, since a bug like this one is exactly the kind of thing no in-game warning will catch for you.