❤️ Absolute Hearts

You hit them. You just don't know how close they are.

Every fight in Minecraft is guesswork. Four hits in, is the guy in front of you one swing from death or sitting on a golden apple? You find out the moment it stops mattering.

Absolute Hearts puts the health bar where you are already looking: over their head.

Hearts, a bar, a plain 14/20, a percentage — or the two overlays the old UHC servers used to draw, brought back on purpose. It reads the numbers the server already sends your client, so there is nothing to install on the server, nothing to configure for your friends, and nothing that can get you kicked for a mod the admin never heard of.

⚡ Built for the fights that are decided in a second

Eleven builds. 1.8.9 to 26.3. Soup PvP never left 1.8.9, and neither did we.

No lag between truth and picture. The number over a head is whatever the server last said, this tick. The bar that drains behind it is decoration and is never what you read.

Nothing allocated per frame. No garbage, no stutter, no map lookups in the render path — an upper limit per frame that shrinks the range instead of dropping to 20 fps in a 40-mob pit.

👁️ Six ways to show it

🫀 Hearts — the row you know, in the game's own heart textures, so your resource pack is what you see. Or the mod's own set, identical on every server you join.

📊 Bar — one clean bar, green through orange to red.

🔢 Number · 💯 Percent — 14/20, or 70 %. Nothing else.

🟩 Classic overlay — the bordered green bar with the numbers written inside it, the way the old health-indicator plugins drew it.

🏷️ Classic tag — 18 ♥ next to the name, and nothing more.

🎯 It shows what the others leave out

🥇 Absorption as golden hearts — you can see who just ate a golden apple 🛡️ Armour points next to the row 💥 Damage numbers that float up from the hit, yours and theirs 🧡 The ghost bar that drains a moment behind the real one, so a big hit reads as a big hit ⚪ A white flash on damage, green on healing, a pulse below 20 % ✖️ A compact row with x2 once a boss has more hearts than fit over a head

🎚️ And exactly as much as you want

Who gets a bar: only players · players and mobs · everything alive. When: always · only when hurt · only what you are looking at · only in combat. Tamed animals always, mobs only when they are hurt, a range with a soft edge instead of a hard pop, and three ways to treat walls: off, on, dimmed.

On the screen itself, both switched off until you want them: the health of whatever is under your crosshair, and your own health at eye level, each with its own offset and scale.

🧭 Six presets, one click

⚙️ A settings screen that explains itself

Groups down the left, a search that also reads the explanations, a live preview that draws with the same code the world does, and the explanation of whatever your mouse is on written out at the bottom — not hidden in a tooltip you have to wait for.

H turns it on and off · J opens the settings · one more key cycles the display.

Fourteen languages: English, Deutsch, Français, Español, Italiano, Português (BR), Nederlands, Polski, Русский, Українська, Türkçe, 日本語, 한국어, 简体中文.

📦 Versions

The same displays on 1.8.9, for the servers that never moved on.

Client side only. No server install, no dependencies, no network packets of its own — it works in every modpack and on every server you can already join.

🔍 Two honest notes

Golden hearts show up for players, not for mobs. The server sends absorption for players only; for mobs it is not on the wire at all, so no mod can draw it client-side. Measured, not guessed.

Potion effects of other creatures never reach your client either, so there is no effect colouring. If a mod promises you that without a server part, ask it where the data comes from.

🗺️ What's next

Team list at the edge of the screen for team UHC · health from the scoreboard where a server keeps it there · team colours · hiding friends · more old versions (1.19.2, 1.18.2, 1.16.5, 1.12.2).

Part of the Absolute series, next to Absolute AFK Cinema.