A small client-side, purely visual Minecraft mod: while you hold a sword, it shows the vanilla entity hitboxes — exactly the ones from the F3+B debug overlay — so you can read PvP and mob fights at a glance.
When a sword is in your main hand, the mod turns on Minecraft's own entity-hitbox debug rendering for every entity: the interpolated white collision box, the red eye box, and the blue look vector — identical to pressing F3+B. When you stop holding a sword, the overlay is turned back off. No custom geometry is drawn; the mod only flips the game's native render-hitboxes flag.
It respects a manually toggled F3+B: the mod snapshots your current state when it forces the overlay on, and restores that exact state when you put the sword away. So if you had F3+B on yourself, it stays on.
Swords are detected via the minecraft:swords item tag (with a c:swords fallback), so it covers
vanilla swords, component-defined swords, and modded swords alike — it does not rely on
instanceof SwordItem.
This is not a cheat. Nothing is sent to the server: the overlay is rendered locally on your client only. The mod changes no gameplay — no attribute is modified, no reach is extended, no packets are altered. It therefore works on every server, including strict vanilla anti-cheat servers, exactly like any rendering-only client mod.
Settings live in config/swordhitbox.json (created on first run) under the settings object:
| Key | Type | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
enabled |
boolean | true |
Master switch. When false, the overlay is never toggled on. |
Planned (not yet implemented): an optional red highlight of entities within attack range, via a mixin. The current build shows the plain vanilla hitboxes only.
The mod emits anonymous usage telemetry to PostHog (a stable random install_id, MC/loader
versions, and a one-shot swh_hitboxes_shown event carrying your enabled value). No personal
data, no IP-based geolocation, no per-frame events.
Opt out any of these ways:
- set
"telemetry": falseinconfig/swordhitbox.json; - pass
-Dswordhitbox.telemetry=falseto the JVM; - dev environments never emit telemetry.
- Fabric and NeoForge
- Minecraft 1.21.11 and 26.1.2
Requires Fabric API on Fabric. Client-only on both loaders.