For a good chunk of time, about the first three hours or so, it's extremely difficult to create more than a couple of pokeballs at once. The recipe calls for a lot of iron and apricorns, two resources hard to come by when you have weak tools and no farming set up.
To fix this issue, I recommend implementing Hissuian Pokeballs from Legends Arceus as a way to allow players to start catching some pokemon earlier!
The recipe would probably work best as it is in the original game, requiring one apricorn and one tumble-stone to craft exactly one ball. I will explain how each section of this recipe can be adapted to work well in Pixelmon.
One obvious change to make is to require a cooked apricorn instead of a raw one. It will remain consistent with how standard pokeballs are crafted in this game and will require the player to at least have some form of starter base with furnace accessibility. One important feature to include is the ability to craft a hissuian pokeball with any colour of cooked apricorn, as there is no guarantee that the player will easily be able to find a specific colour close to spawn.
The tumble-stone ingredient can work well with a couple of different implementation options. The most obvious way to include this new stone is through creating an ore dedicated to it, spawning near the surface just like coal. However, a more cohesive way to include it perhaps is to obtain the stone by mining cobblestone with a hammer, granting a secondary use for this tool which otherwise is only used to mint lids and bases.
As a tradeoff for the ease of crafting these balls compared to modern ones, the catchrate should be lower; I propose implementing a global 0.4x catchrate multiplier to all forms of hissuian balls. Most pokemon you find when starting out generally have high catchrates, which should still allow them to be reasonably captured while adding a bit of challenge that normally doesn't exist when starting with normal balls. This also incentivises pivoting to normal balls once you have the resources, as even a standard red pokeball's catch-rate of 1x is better than a hissuian great ball's 0.8x multiplier in this case. The numbers can be changed if needed, of course, if playtesting proves this to be too weak or powerful.
I hope I've explained my case well enough. There needs to be an easier way to start forming your team in the first, critical hours of play. This will make the start more fun and fluid, better mixing together the early games of Minecraft and Pixelmon together!
Thank you for reading and considering this suggestion~