This mod backports lightning rod, which was introduced in 1.17, to 1.12.2.

Made as similar to original as possible in most aspects - appearance, functionality, block properties, particles.
The only thing not included is oxidation/wax related behavior.

Well-known appearance

...it works, I guess?

Crafting recipe

Orange iron will do if there is no copper

Craftable from copper the same way as it is originally, copper is just not vanilla.
Any oredict copper should be ok, IC2 for example.
If no copper was found, then fallback recipe with vanilla ingredients is enabled instead.

Why another lightning rod mod

I got my wooden roof burnt and could not find a mod for 1.12.2 which:

adds 1.17-like lightning rod which actually diverts natural lightnings;
does not affect vanilla behavior when no rod is placed;
does not bring ton of things with that rod;
does not depend on whole tech mods stack.

So I decided that I need it and someone else could need it too.

Compatibility

Due to how thunderstorm and lightning work, I could not avoid making it a coremod.
Modifications are applied to lightning code and thunderstorm logic in chunk ticking code.
You can expect incompatibility with mods that change lightning behavior, especially if those are coremods too. Or it can be fine - there is only one way to find out.
Anyway, I tried to make insertions tiny so I hope chances of conflict are not too high.

Other technical things

Made with performance in mind; no observable lag or difference with non-modded version was found when testing and profiling under different scenarios.
Save size will grow a little: mod uses index somewhat similar to 1.14+ POI system and stores it in separate region files.
Original implementation was reused wherever possible, but some things were rewritten or skipped. Also I am not really a Java developer and this is my first mod. Which means behavior may differ somehow or have bugs, especially in edge cases - please report those.

Notice

As you may have guessed, backport mod uses parts of later Minecraft versions to bring them to earlier version. Minecraft is Mojang property, so are its parts. Therefore keep fair-use things in mind and don't do nasty things to intellectual property and stuff.