Vanilla²

A Fabric combat and progression overhaul that keeps Minecraft close to vanilla while expanding weapons, armor, enchantments, and combat utility.

Overview

Vanilla² is a Minecraft Fabric mod that modernizes combat, enchanting, and item progression without replacing the vanilla identity of the game. It rebalances weapon and armor behavior, extends vanilla combat math, adds a recipe-driven enchanting system, introduces new special enchantments, and improves several combat quality-of-life interactions on both server and client.

Features

• Rebalances sword, axe, spear/trident, mace, shield, fishing rod, armor, tool, and weapon behavior.
• Expands armor, protection, magic protection, mace protection, spear protection, and dripstone protection handling beyond vanilla limits.
• Updates combat damage calculations so higher armor and absorb values continue to scale correctly.
• Adds new attributes and damage types for expanded combat interactions.
• Changes item durability and combat stats by material for tools, weapons, armor, and fishing rods.
• Updates shield blocking behavior through modern block-attack components.
• Changes potion stack sizes.
• Lets fishing rods work as combat tools with hook damage and enchantment integration.
• Lets sword targeting pass through configured blocks such as grass and flowers.
• Improves offhand interaction priority for fishing rod combat cases.
• Extends the armor HUD so armor values above 20 render with additional rows.
• Adds a custom Sulfur Cube entity variant/behavior and related loot/food items.

Enchanting overhaul

Vanilla² replaces much of vanilla enchanting with a recipe-based enchantment table and an enchantment recipe book.

• Adds enchanting recipes for vanilla and Vanilla² enchantments.
• Adds enchantment recipe discovery through loot, fishing, piglin bartering, villager librarians, and structure chests.
• Adds an enchanting recipe book UI and server/client synchronization for known recipes and selected recipes.
• Adds enchantment slot categories such as Special, Damage, Secondary, Defense, Utility, and Curse.
• Supports enchantment profiles so an enchantment can have different behavior depending on the selected slot/profile.
• Removes normal enchanted book behavior from creative/trading flows where needed for the new system.
• Updates anvil, villager trade, command, loot, and recipe-book behavior to support the new enchantment model.

Enchantments

Vanilla² changes many vanilla enchantments and adds new ones.

New enchantments

• Dash - burst forward and strike entities caught in the lunge.
• Fractured - mine multiple blocks asynchronously through manual clicks.
• Ruthless - greatly increases attack damage at a self-damage cost.
• Swirling - spin with your weapon and repeatedly strike nearby enemies.
• Void Strike - applies the Voided effect to targets.

Reworked/enhanced vanilla enchantments

Vanilla² includes updated data and behavior for many vanilla enchantments, including protection variants, Sharpness, Smite, Bane of Arthropods, Fire Aspect, Sweeping Edge, Looting, Efficiency, Silk Touch, Unbreaking, Fortune, Mending, Infinity, Punch, Power, Flame, Piercing, Multishot, Quick Charge, Loyalty, Riptide, Channeling, Impaling, Lure, Luck of the Sea, Depth Strider, Frost Walker, Soul Speed, Swift Sneak, Breach, Density, Wind Burst, curses, and more.

Status effects and combat states

• Adds Voided, a custom effect used by Void Strike and related damage logic.
• Adds lunging and swirling combat states for special enchantment movement/attack behavior.
• Adds cooldown and hotkey support for special enchantments.
• Adds custom death messages for fished, eviscerate, and swirled damage.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.2.
• Fabric Loader 0.19.3 or newer.
• Fabric API 0.152.2+26.2 or compatible.
• Java 25 or newer.

Installation

1. Download the latest Vanilla² jar from the releases page.
2. Install Fabric Loader and Fabric API for the supported Minecraft version.
3. Place the Vanilla² .jar file in your mods folder.
4. Restart Minecraft or your server.

Compatibility notes

• Vanilla² is a gameplay overhaul and intentionally changes vanilla combat and enchanting behavior.
• The mod declares an incompatibility with ViaFabricPlus.
• Client resources such as HUD changes are client-side, while combat and enchanting rules are server-authoritative.

Development

Build the project with the included Gradle wrapper.

./gradlew build

Run a development client with the mod loaded.

./gradlew runClient

Build artifacts are written to build/libs/.