Detecting conservation, loss, or gain in a crafting game with items and recipes
Your problem is equivalent to asking whether there is some linear combination of row vectors from your $\mathbb R^{m\times n}$ matrix that has all coefficients positive and sums to a vector in which (a) every element is $\ge 0$ and (b) at least one element is $&gt; 0$.

(Notice that the order of the operations doesn't matter: Running them in some order might cause the quantity of some item to dip below zero, but we can just look for the low-water-mark and suppose that we have at least that many of each item to start with.)

I think this can be solved by linear programming: Make a variable for each coefficient, add $\ge 0$ constraints for each element in the output vector (each element is a dot product of coefficient variables and constant coefficients from recipes), more $\ge 0$ constraints for each coefficient variable, and set the function to maximise to be the sum of all elements. To make it bounded, set the sum of coefficient variables to some constant, e.g. 1. Iff the solution value is $&gt; 0$, you have non-conservation!

Note that fractional values are not an issue: They must be rational, so you can always multiply through by all denominators to get a pure-integer solution.