Lava Boats

Ride lava like it's water.

Lava Boats adds Crimson and Warped boats - in both regular and chest variants - that float and steer on lava exactly the way ordinary boats do on water. The boats never burn, their passengers never catch fire, and a dropped boat bobs back up to the lava surface instead of sinking.

Available across four mod loaders and three Minecraft versions - Fabric, Quilt, Forge, and NeoForge, on Minecraft 1.20.1, 1.21.11, and 26.1.2.

Supported platforms

One source, every modern loader. On 1.20.1 the family covers 1.20-1.20.4, and Quilt runs the Fabric build. On the newer versions Mojang's engine narrows the field to Fabric + NeoForge (Quilt has no mappings for them yet, and classic Forge ends at 1.20.x). Grab the jar that matches your loader and Minecraft version from the Releases page or Modrinth.

Features

• Four new boats - Crimson and Warped, each with a chest variant - crafted from their matching nether-stem planks just like vanilla boats (5 planks for a boat; chest + boat for a chest boat).
• Lava travel - nether-stem boats float on the lava surface and move at full water speed. Place one on lava and go.
• Depth Strider in lava - Depth Strider boots carry over to lava, speeding you through it just like water and scaling with the enchantment level. (Minecraft 1.21.11 and 26.1.2.)
• Fireproof - the boats are immune to fire and lava; they won't burn or break.
• Safe passengers - anyone riding a lava boat takes no fire or lava damage and shows no flames.
• Always resurfaces - knock a lava boat under (a ghast fireball, an explosion) and it drives firmly back up to the surface instead of sinking to the floor.
• Floating drops - break a boat over lava (or drop one in) and the item rises straight back to the surface, fire-resistant like Netherite.
• Recipes unlocked on join - the boat recipes appear in your recipe book the moment you enter a world, so they're easy to find.
• High-quality art - 128x boat textures with PBR (normal + specular) maps, recoloured to match the Crimson and Warped plank palettes. The chest on a chest boat still looks like a chest.

How it works

Lava buoyancy runs on both the server and the client, so a lava boat floats whether it's being ridden, sitting empty, or knocked around - the boat's fluid checks are taught to treat lava like water for nether-stem boats, and vanilla's own float/steer logic does the rest. The fireproofing and passenger safety protect everyone, even players without the mod (they just won't get the lava buoyancy themselves). No new networking and no custom packets, so a vanilla client can still connect to a server running Lava Boats.

Installation

Drop the jar that matches your loader and Minecraft version into your mods/ folder, along with its dependencies:

Works in singleplayer and on servers:

• Server - install it so the boats exist and the fire protection applies to everyone.
• Client - install it to ride the lava and see the boats.

Recipes

The boats appear in the Tools & Utilities creative tab next to the vanilla boats.

Building from source

Each Minecraft version lives on its own branch (main = newest; *-<version> branches for the others). From a branch:

The jars are written to each module's build/libs/. The boat textures are generated from a base resource pack by tools/recolor_boats.py - see the header of that script for the inputs it expects.

License

All Rights Reserved.