Light Rod Mod

Light Rod Mod

This mod lets you craft and launch devastating 'Light Rod' projectiles, which are horizontal photon missiles based on the end rod model.

Here's the recipe. Only the layout and orientation shown below will work.

Not feeling crafty? Here's the chat bar command to give yourself 64 ready-to-launch lethal Light Rods.

/give @s stick[custom_name={"text":"Light Rod"}] 64

Quick notes

TL;DR
The info above is all you need to arm yourself with 64 devastating ready-to-launch Light Rod projectiles.
Hold them in the main hand and sneak to launch.

For the best visual experience
This mod really benefits from dynamic lighting. It's been tested extensively with LambDynamicLights, but it should work well with whatever setup you prefer.

Details

More about Light Rods

Light Rods are horizontal projectiles launched by holding them in the main hand and sneaking. The sneak trigger timing is designed to feel responsive while also giving the player a small window in which to untrigger a shot.

Untriggering is useful because only one Light Rod projectile can be airborne at any one time. If there's a Light Rod in the air already a second one will refuse to launch, so it's good to have a way to back off from taking a shot if it looks like it could go wrong, particularly in close combat.

Light Rods can be destroyed in three ways:

• When they reach the end of their range (30 blocks), and run out of energy
• When they hit a solid block, and are destroyed in a contained explosion along with the block
• When they hit a mob, and are destroyed in a burst of energy along with the mob

Crouching Player, Hidden Creeper

Hits are minimally environmentally destructive, limited to either a single block or usually one entity, although it's possible to hit multiple entities at once if they're very close together. Players can't take direct damage from a Light Rod's effects, or from proximity to them. Even if a mob is hit right next to a player, the resulting blast won't cause the player any damage.

More about this mod

Light Rod Mod now works fully in all 3 vanilla dimensions.

This mod was developed for single player only and has been tested solely in single player worlds.

This is one of a bunch of custom weapons developed for personal use. Most of them are comically useless in actual gameplay (lots of time spent dying and laughing) but this one turned out to be unexpectedly effective, especially with practice, and in fact it's possible to get very handy with it. It's great for Survival, but it's also worth checking out with Creative - it can be very satisfying just flying around at night blasting anything that moves into particles.

Gameplay

Tips

Mobs sometimes calmly leap over approaching Light Rods and then continue on as if nothing has happened, especially in Survival mode while attacking. How do they know to avoid something that has never existed in the game before? They just do. So:

Tip #1: Standing one block higher than a mob when launching a Light Rod prevents them from being able to jump over it.

Tip #2: Due to their jump attack and overall speed, this weapon's nemesis is the spider, particularly at very close range, where they're often too quick for Tip #1.

Tip #3: This datapack really benefits from dynamic lighting, as seen in the videos linked below. It's been extensively tested using LambDynamicLights with Fabric, but it should work well with whatever setup you prefer.

Have fun!!

Videos

Full HD versions are available on YouTube.

Recipe and short demo: timeout, block hit, mob hit.

Gameplay montage. Starts slowly. (Gameplay from the original Overland-only edition).

Potential issues

Light Rods kill creakings.
This is by design, it would just be too weird if they didn't. Therefore, if you depend on creakings for something in-game, don't hit them with a Light Rod! However tempting it may be ;)