How do you undo a work item?

[Scott Kimberly]

Is there any way to undo an item if you havent started working it?

I finally got tin bronze and was going to make a sword blade. I shift-right clicked to place the ingot on the anvil and it immediately just chose shears to make. This is extremely aggravating and not the first time.

Is there a way to smelt it back down so I can make what I actually want?

[Scott Kimberly]

Nevermind, I figured it out.

If you take the work item and put it back into a crucible, you can smelt it back into an ingot.

[rodabon]

I'm guessing this was a version prior to 1.6   I have the same issue where my mouse sometimes double clicks and I end up with a shears work item on the anvil.  I tried to follow the solution above and it will not go into a slot in the crucible where you would normally put ores.  It is frustrating to waste your precious ores.

[Streetwind]

You might be able to craft it with a chisel to break the work item down into smeltable chunks, in the same way you can recycle ingots and anvils.

[Jeremy Brown]

I tried this and I had accidentally chosen a chisel when I wanted to do bronze plates. I had two ingots and by using the chisel i only got 10 nuggets back
I also tried using the chisel for the copper anvil I have and it didn't even work.

[Streetwind]

5 hours ago, Jeremy Brown said:

I also tried using the chisel for the copper anvil I have and it didn't even work.

Your chisel requires a certain minimum durability for the recipe to work. It'll definitely work with a fresh chisel - if not, you're doing something wrong.

[Eric McAlpine]

You can do the same with iron, but it will need put back through a bloomery.  I'm not sure about steel. I think it also will need a bloomery trip, but maybe also run through the furnace + anvil again.

[ClericalHeretic]

I'm a little late to the punch, but for the sake of future issues:

I've done testing and as of 1.18.13, the only way to get your resources is to use a chisel on it in the crafting menu, which sucks considering how many items say they smelt back into an ingot. Maybe it'll be fixed in a future update?
 

[DukieDuke]

2 years later we are in 1.21.6 and the only thing that works is still putting a chisel on top of the work item in your crafting menu. I did this after clicking clever accidentally instead of plate. It did however return 20 bits, which is not losing any material other than the charcoal to heat it up. It would be nice to be able to change the work item if there has been no hammer hits made to the ingot, but it is what it is. At least we aren't losing material (with copper at least)

[williams_482]

Resetting a work item to the ingot or plate originally placed on the anvil if no hammer hits have been made or additional materials added would be a huge improvement. I regularly find myself fatfingering the output selection, which is always infuriating. Worse, it becomes more of a bother the more advanced (and thus costly) the material is: copper and related alloys only need to be reheated in the crucible, but a second attempt at iron requires another go in the bloomery, and steel bits are totally unrecoverable. 

I generally dislike any mechanic where materials are committed with a single click and cannot be undone. Waiting to fully "lock in" a work piece until the player has taken a second action (which they would do anyway to start forging the item) just make sense. This also applies to knapping and clayforming, which I think should both allow you to recover your placed flint/clay by right clicking with an empty hand if you haven't actually removed any voxels yet. 

[meapineapple]

I'll go as far as to suggest that it should really be possible to change the anvil work item at any time, even after using the hammer. Accidentally removed too many bits? Well, at least you can form what's still there into a chisel.