This is an addon for NotEnoughItems. Inspired by what was originally debug functionality in another mod, leveraging the recipe awareness of NEI this mod allows showing the overall - recursive - item costs for crafting an item. This makes it a lot easier to judge the worth of items, and also has the practical effect that you can gather the raw materials for whatever you want to craft without manually going through nested recipes in NEI.

When there are multiple recipes available, the mod will choose the one with the least overall complexity, and breaks ties by preferring crafting processes with fewer outputs. For example, iron ingots can be crafted either by decomposing a block of iron, or melting iron ore - the melting process is preferred, because it has only one output, where the iron block gives nine ingots.

Modpacks: you are free to add this mod to your modpack. I'd be happy to hear about it, but you have my permission nonetheless (not that you'd need it, the mod is MIT licensed, but hey, thanks for asking!)