Topic says it all, I'm thinking of making sort of a Recycling Rod of sorts. I want the Rod to turn dropped pieces of armor into ingots or nuggets. I know the basics and everything but that's pretty much as far as tutorials go.

 

Any help would be appreciated.

EntityItem objects are Entities and can be found when dropped by using world#entitiesInAABB(...)

There are at least three different versions, you're going to want the one that takes a Class as a parameter and looks for Entities that subclass the passed type.

This might help you, here's an example. Then you can simply iterate and do something to the entities.

 

double posX = player.posX;
        double posY = player.posY;
        double posZ = player.posZ;
        List<EntityItem> groundItems = world.getEntitiesWithinAABB(
                EntityItem.class,
                AxisAlignedBB.getBoundingBox(posX, posY, posZ,
                        posX + 1.0D, posY + 1.0D,
                        posZ + 1.0D).expand(4.0D, 4.0D, 4.0D));