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Damage and Destruction Effects

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AntonIT99 edited this page Nov 4, 2026 · 2 revisions

Damage and Destruction Effects

Damaged driveables show where and how they are hurt, die the way their kind of machine dies, throw off the parts that are shot away, and leave burning wrecks. NPCs drawn as vehicles show all of this too. Everything here is visual, apart from wrecks: they are real entities that block movement.

Contents

Damage on Parts

A part shows nothing until it has lost about 40% of its hit points. From there the effect grows smoothly until the part is lost. Effects come from inside the part's own box, where the model draws it, turret parts included, so smoke rises from the engine deck that was hit rather than from the middle of the vehicle.

Damaged and burning parts are also drawn darker. A part on fire scorches faster than one that is only worn down.

Fast movers lay their smoke and vapour along the path they flew this tick, so an aircraft leaves an unbroken trail instead of a row of puffs. A helicopter whose rotor is turning pushes its smoke down and outwards.

Part Effects

Each part has an effect kind. The default comes from the part's name; a content pack can choose another with PartDamageEffect <part> <effect> (see Config Reference).

Effect Default parts What it shows
structure core and any part not listed below Grey smoke turning black, then fire.
engine engine, engine2-engine6, engineRoom1-engineRoom8 Dark oily smoke early, and the hottest fire. Ships vent it from deck level.
turret turret, barrel, turret1-turret16 Smoke and fire. A tank's turret is where its ammunition cooks off.
armor armour plates, ERA, composite and spaced armour, skirts, belts, bulges, bulkheads, shields Sparks only, never smoke.
running_gear wheels, tracks, skids, floats, trailer Sparks while moving on a damaged wheel or track.
airfoil wings, tail, nose A white fuel-vapour trail behind a fast aircraft, then smoke.
rotor blades Sparks and light smoke.
boiler boilerRoom1-boilerRoom8 White steam instead of smoke.
hull bow, stern, port, starboard, midsection, left, right, buoyancy Bubbles where it is holed under water, and oil spreading on the surface.
superstructure bridge, conning towers, decks, hangars, flight decks, superstructure, steering Smoke and fire.
electronics radars, directors, aps, ads Electrical sparks.
limb leftArm, rightArm, head, hips Electrical sparks and a hydraulic mist.
gasbag gasbag A pale leak, and a large fire once alight.
none infantry Nothing.

Parts Shot Off

When a part is destroyed, it bursts where it was and, for parts that can come away, flies off as a piece drawn with the vehicle's own model: turrets, wheels, tracks, wings, tails, rotors, limbs, armour plates, radars and superstructure. Parts it carries go with it, so a wing takes its wing wheel along. Pieces tumble, bounce, smoke while they burn, bounce off walls, come to rest on the ground and finally settle into it. They are client-side only.

Death by Machine Type

Machine What happens
Tank (turreted or tracked) Ammunition cook-off: jets of flame from the turret, with rounds popping inside. The more rounds aboard, the longer it lasts and the more often it pops; with an empty rack there is no cook-off. About one death in three with a full rack throws the turret into the air, fewer with less aboard.
Ground vehicle It burns; sometimes a wheel comes off.
Plane The fuel in the wings goes up, as hard as the fuel left allows; sometimes a wing comes off. A plane that dies in the air falls and goes in burning when it strikes.
Helicopter The rotor blades fly off still turning; sometimes the tail breaks away.
Mecha Electrical sparks as it topples over its feet, and a cloud of dust as it lands.
Ship The boilers vent steam with a hiss, then the magazine goes up if there is ammunition aboard. The wreck lists and sinks.

Choices such as whether a turret is thrown come from the entity's identity, so every player sees the same death. Content packs can turn the cook-off off with CookOff false and set the turret-toss chance with TurretTossChance. Each death leaves a scorch mark on the ground, and so does an aircraft crash; scorch marks fade over about two minutes.

Damaged and Crashing Aircraft

With enableRealisticAircraftDamage on (the default), aircraft damage is progressive rather than all-or-nothing, and it is the same for player-flown planes and for NPCs drawn as aircraft:

Damaged part Effect in flight
Wing Lifts less, up to about a third less just before it breaks, and rolls the aircraft toward itself; the pilot can hold it level until the wing is lost. Below 60% health its tank leaks fuel, faster the worse the damage.
Tail The elevators and rudder answer more slowly, down to about a third of their authority.
Engine (engine rooms, or the parts carrying the propellers) Loses power slowly at first, then faster; below 40% it misfires with puffs of black smoke and a bang.
Rotor blades Lift less, and the airframe shakes.
Tail rotor or tail boom Holds the fuselage against the rotor's torque less well.

A helicopter whose engine is lost, switched off or out of fuel can autorotate: air rising through the rotor keeps it turning, so lowering the collective holds rotor speed in a steady descent. Raising the collective near the ground spends that speed on lift to cushion the landing, but it cannot be held for long. A plane that lands without its gear, or with its main wheels shot off, slides to a stop on its belly; a gentle belly landing is survivable but scrapes a little off the airframe, and leaves a furrow of scorched ground.

An aircraft that can no longer be flown, or that dies in the air, comes down as an airframe instead of tumbling:

Lost How it comes down
Nothing (pilot dead or core destroyed) Nose into the wind, along a steepening dive.
One wing Rolls over toward the stump into a spiral.
Tail A flat spin that falls slowly and almost level.
Both wings, or a wing and the tail Tumbles.
Tail rotor Spins about the mast, slowed by what the rotor still lifts.
Main rotor Drops, nose tucking under.

A burning aircraft trails black smoke that can be followed across the sky from up to 320 blocks. One blown apart in the air by a large blast may lose its tail or a wing as a separate piece; flat pieces such as wings, tailplanes and blades flutter down like leaves. A falling aircraft screams louder and higher as it speeds up, its crash is heard with a delay over distance, and one that goes into water throws up a column of spray and steam instead of a fireball.

The pilot of a damaged aircraft sees warnings under the aircraft readout (red ones blink and sound an alarm), feels the airframe shake through the view when vehicleScreenShake is on, and gets oil thrown across the view by a badly hit engine. Turning enableRealisticAircraftDamage off restores the previous behaviour.

Wrecks

With driveableWreckLifetime above 0, a destroyed driveable stays where it died as a wreck instead of vanishing:

  • It cannot be entered, opened or driven, and missiles do not lock on to it.
  • It keeps its collision, and its remaining parts still stop rounds, so it can be used as cover.
  • It is charred, settles to the ground or sinks in water, listing as it goes down.
  • It burns out in stages over its lifetime: a heavy fire with a smoke column seen from afar, then the column thinning, then smouldering. The heavy fire lasts at most 45 seconds and burns as hard as the fuel left in the tank allows. Rain holds it down and boils off as steam, and flames under water become steam with a hiss.
  • It crackles while it burns and creaks as it settles.
  • On a thermal sight it shows white-hot while it burns and cools as it burns out.
  • Enough explosive damage, about as much as its hull had hit points, blows it apart, clearing the way.
  • Its contents and part recipes are dropped as before, when it is destroyed.

Wrecks are saved with the world. At 0, or for a type with NoWreck true, destroyed driveables are removed at once, as in earlier versions, but their death is still played for those watching.

NPC Vehicles

NPCs drawn as driveables, from NPC Vehicles & Soldiers, use the same part effects, parts shot off and deaths, read from the part state their server already sends. Destroyed parts are no longer drawn on them, and scorched parts are drawn darker. Their load is not known, so their deaths assume ammunition and fuel about 60% full. An NPC dies as the entity it is and leaves no wreck, apart from what Teams Bots put in place. An NPC aircraft that loses a wing, its tail, its rotor or its airframe in the air is not killed at once: it comes down as described in Damaged and Crashing Aircraft, holding its fire, and dies with a fireball or a splash when it strikes. Its crew, if set to bail out, jump while there is height left.

Settings

Setting Config Default Purpose
driveableWreckLifetime common 120 seconds How long wrecks stay. 0 turns wrecks off.
driveableDamageEffectDensity client 1.0 Multiplies the damage effects. 0 turns them off.
maxDetachedDriveablePieces client 24 Pieces drawn at once. 0 turns them off.

Rising smoke, steam and fire drift with one shared wind, which turns slowly, gusts and blows harder in storms, so every column over a battlefield leans the same way.

All damage particles also follow particleDistanceScale, the distance thinning and maxFlansParticlesPerTick described in Mod Config.

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