Beacon Obscura

This small server-side-only mod lets you hide a beacon beam by placing tinted glass above it, while keeping all the beacon's effects working normally.

Ideally, this mod would be obsoleted by Mojang adding this obvious and logical feature to the stock game… it's frankly what we'd expect to happen if a block of tinted glass was put in the beam's path. This idea isn't new; it was just assumed it'd require client-side mods; turns out, there's a neat little hack that works.

Usage

Place one or more tinted glass blocks anywhere directly above the beacon block. The beam will disappear. Remove them to show the beam again.

Everything else works exactly as normal — effects, the pyramid requirement, and using sticky pistons to enable/disable the beacon.

Single-player

If you drop the mod jar into a singleplayer client's mods/ folder, it won't do anything in normal singleplayer. However, if you use "Open to LAN", the mod should kick in correctly for all connected players.

Compatibility

Tested on Minecraft 26.1.2 and 26.2 on Fabric. NeoForge support is included but not yet tested… it was ported by Claude.

Compatibility with other beacon-modifying mods is unknown. The change is very small and only affects beacons that have tinted glass above them. It's not expected to impact performance at all.

How it works

In vanilla Minecraft 26, both client and server check for beacon activation, but effects are server-side while rendering is client-side, so changing tinted glass from effectively opaque to effectively transparent just on the server means the effects happen, but the client believes the beacon's inactive, so doesn't render the beam.