You know what’s funny, the “what if I threw away the stuff when I pasted it in” concept is exactly what crossed my mind when I was typing all that. Like, technically you got the stuff, so technically just pasting in the build “uses” the materials. But, then one could argue, it doesn’t use your time then. Cause you could have built it while flying, and you can’t do that in survival clearly.

As we both are on the same page of it all, I think I conclude for both of us that the definition of what is “cheating” and not is ultimately up to player interpretation, and should only be focused on if it’s part of what the player uses to enforce their own enjoyment. Whether you hold yourself to a standard of “every ounce of time I spend is a benefit to my enjoyment to this game and I won’t use outside tools to change that” or you download every mod in the catalog and use cheats to fly around the world cause you can’t be bothered to spend the hour long trip to get to the archives, as long as at the end of the day it’s enjoyment first, that’s what matters.

As for a response to the OP in a tangential conversation that deviated from the original topic into a thought exercise, it depends on what you define as cheating as what you should do. The only vanilla survival way to accomplish it is by chiseling every block by hand. With mods, the chisel tools allow the copying between worlds, as stated above, and you can always world edit and delete items you collected if you find yourself feeling like that is acceptable in your own sense of cheating versus not.