Is it possible to sort non-stackable items in minecraft?

Item Sorters are super sweet. But, I have a skeleton farm, and am getting tons of non-stackable drops. Since armor can be smelted into iron/gold, I'd like to smelt those drops in a furnace, and burn bows in a furnace. And trash all leather armor. Is there a way to sort out these non-stackable items in vanilla survival?


There is no one way for all of them, but most can be sorted using different tricks: Armour and weapons can be equipped to zombies and unequipped again, potions and water bottles can be filtered using a brewing stand, shulker boxes can be placed and broken automatically and so on.

For now, please just look up " sorter" for all of them on YouTube, I'll expand this answer later once I've figured it out for all items myself.


A temporary solution for armor, it can be dispensed onto an armor stand, then use a cobweb to catch the non armor items into a hopper for further sorting. Only problem is you can only have so many armor stands. After the farming is complete you could break the armor stands (by hand or from dispensed arrows) and sort them afterwards, and reload your stands back into position manually.

When you place a hopper under a brewing stand, it will remove the water bottles before the brewing commences.

Bows and fishing rods are fuel for furnaces.

I have no solutions for saddles or enchanted books yet.