Sails and Airships

Build a ship from blocks, click the helm, and sail it. Tow your cows, fire your cannons, cook dinner on the way.

A lightweight, vanilla-styled Fabric mod - no extra dependencies beyond Fabric API. Sailing ships and airships are built from ordinary blocks - no custom hulls, no menus, no tech trees. Build a ship, add a helm, and go.

Ships sail on water or lava. Break through ice with an iron bow. Tow leashed mobs and rowboats, or carry them on deck.
Airships fly anywhere - overworld, nether, or the End. Hot-air lift from campfires, thrust from ghast drives.
Cannons are optional ship-mounted weapons. Load and fire while underway.
Gameplay-balanced. Firework-boosted elytra is disabled by default so ships, airships, and horses stay relevant as transport. Fully configurable.

While underway: furnaces and brewing stands keep processing, chests and barrels are accessible, beds keep your spawn point (it migrates as you move), item frames and paintings stay put, and deck lighting works at night. Explosions don't damage ships mid-sail but do stop them. Leash mobs to a fence post on the ship - but towing too many slows you down. Hull blocks shield passengers from arrows and fireballs mid-sail.

note: this mod was initially known as "Sails and Blimps"

Water ships

Craft a Ship Helm (planks + iron ingots + cartography table).
Build a hull floating on water. Place the helm on deck.
Hang sails off a mast (sticks + wool). More sail = faster, up to the hull-length cap.
Right-click the helm to assemble. WASD to sail, mouse to steer. Page Up / Page Down to zoom the third-person camera in and out.
Sneak to dismount and dock - the ship rotates to the nearest cardinal direction and becomes blocks again.

Helm Block Recipe Sail Block Recipe

The mod flood-fills connected blocks from the helm. Air and water are boundaries - the hull must be surrounded by water and have water under its bottom keel blocks, and not be connected to land. If the hull is connected to terrain, assembly fails — so cast off first. 10,000-block cap, 84 block max length.

Build long for speed. Top speed (blocks/sec) can't exceed the length at the waterline. A 5-block dinghy tops out at ~5 b/s; a 14-block frigate hits the ~14 b/s ceiling. Width doesn't matter.

Heavy ships ride low. Hull buoyancy determines whether your ship floats and how deep it sits. Each block type has a density - your hull's average must stay under 1.0 (water density) to float at all, and lighter hulls ride higher.

Density Examples 0.1 Wool, carpets, sails, banners, glass panes, signs, trapdoors, ladders 0.17 Wooden slabs, wooden doors, fences, fence gates 0.38 Planks, logs, stairs, glass blocks, chests, iron bars, anything not listed 2.0 Stone, bricks, obsidian, walls, concrete, sand, dirt, furnaces 8.0 Iron, copper, netherite, raw ore blocks, anvils, cannons 20.0 Gold block

An all-wood hull rides high. A stone fireplace pushes the waterline up. Iron or gold-clad hulls sink below the surface. Chest contents don't count toward density.

Players can walk the deck while sailing, though deck walking on a moving craft is at your own risk. Mobs on deck will auto-mount for transport (like a Happy Ghast's deck). If no player is aboard for 5 seconds, the ship auto-docks.

Portal frames (obsidian) travel with the ship. The portal is extinguished at launch so you won't teleport mid-sail - relight it after docking.

Salvaging shipwrecks

The easiest way to get your first ship: find a vanilla shipwreck. About a third are upright and intact enough to sail. Dig out the sand or gravel underneath, attach a Ship Helm, and activate it - the wreck rises to a half-flooded state. Clear the water, patch the holes, add sails, and a ladder or hatch to get on deck. Mood: Stan Rogers - Rise Again. Check the Gallery for the steps.

Lava ships

Same helm, same flow - the mod detects lava under the hull automatically.

Average hull density must be under 2.0 (lava density) to float. Stone, concrete, obsidian, crimson/warped planks all work - see the density table above. Oak and birch burn on contact.
Top speed 9 b/s (vs 14 on water).
Use nether sails (sticks + twisting or weeping vines) for fire-immune lava parking.

Twisting Vines sail recipe

Icebreaker

Fit your bow with two iron blocks at the leading edge - one below the waterline, one above. They can be stacked or staggered (upper block one cell forward for a raked bow). The ship breaks through ice at half speed.

Airships

Build a sealed wool envelope (wool blocks, wool stairs, wool slabs) over a gondola with:

At least one lit campfire under an intake hole (lift)
At least one airship foot (separates the gondola from the ground - without feet, the hull is connected to terrain and assembly fails)
Ghast drives for thrust (optional but needed to move forward). Made with a dried ghast, slime balls and sugar, ghast drives consume sugar as fuel - a full charge lasts ~20 minutes of flight. Right-click with sugar to refuel. An empty drive turns grey and unhappy.

Ghast Drive recipe Airship Foot recipe Wool Slab recipe Wool Stair recipe

Place the helm on the gondola of the airship and right-click. Wool stairs seal the corners - see the gallery for a cross-section.

The envelope must have enough sealed air volume to lift the gondola's weight. A bigger envelope lifts a heavier gondola. If the envelope is too small for the weight below it, assembly fails.

Controls: WASD for thrust/turn. Space to climb. Left Control to descend (mod key, not sneak). Page Up / Page Down to zoom the external camera view.

Climb speed scales with campfire-to-weight ratio - 1 lit campfire per 50 weight units saturates at 5 b/s. Soul campfires provide 1.5x lift.

Forward speed scales with ghast drives relative to envelope size - 1 drive per 100 envelope cells saturates at ~10 b/s. More drives on a small airship won't help; a bigger envelope needs more drives to reach top speed.

Descent safety: with a dismounted player on deck, descent caps at 1.5 b/s. No pilot but someone aboard = altitude hold. Fully empty = slow drift down, disassembles on contact. No voluntary mid-air disassembly - land first.

Airships fly in the overworld, nether, and End.

Cannons

Place a cannon on your ship. Load with gunpowder and a cannonball. Fire with a flint and steel, redstone signal, or flaming arrow. Range and blast scale with gunpowder charge. Cannons can be loaded and fired while underway (tho redstone doesn't work underway).

The first hit on a ship stops it dead - the crew has to re-engage the helm to get moving again. Subsequent hits deal blast damage to the now-stationary hull. Board at your discretion.

Cannon recipe Cannonball recipe

Flags

Craft a flag (stick + banner). Flags carry the banner's pattern and colors. Place on a ship to show your colors and read the wind. For a pirate flag, use a black banner with a skull charge pattern (banner + skull charge banner pattern on a loom).

Flag Recipe

Game rules

Server admins can tune with /gamerule:

Rule Default Effect sailsandairships:disable_powered_elytra true Disables firework elytra boost and dampens rain-riptide launches. Gliding still works. sailsandairships:enable_airships true Gates airship assembly and crafting — when off, the airship recipes (ghast drive, airship foot, wool stairs/slabs) are hidden from the recipe book and won't craft. In-flight airships survive being toggled off. sailsandairships:enable_cannons true Gates cannon firing and crafting — when off, the cannon and cannonball recipes are hidden from the recipe book and won't craft. sailsandairships:wind_matters false Wind direction affects sail ship speed. See below.

When wind_matters is on, wind shifts gradually over time and affects sail ships. Sailing with or across the wind gives a speed boost; sailing into the wind slows you down, with a no-go zone ~45° off the wind where the sails slack and you can barely make headway at all. Zig--Zage tacking is then faster than sailing straight upwind. Flags on your ship point downwind, showing the current wind direction at a glance.