Better Concretes

64 new concrete variants across all 16 vanilla colors — smooth, polished, chiseled and brick — plus a custom Chisel tool, dedicated workbench GUI, connected textures on smooth concretes, and full JEI integration.

BetterConcretes banner

What is it

Vanilla concrete comes in 16 colors and exactly one look. Better Concretes turns each of those colors into a full building palette:

Smooth — seamless, tileable concrete with connected-textures (CTM) on every face. Build a wall and the seams disappear.
Polished — clean, symmetric slabs with a subtle highlight, for sharp modern architecture.
Chiseled — carved panel with a center detail, for focal points and trim.
Brick — detailed brick pattern with color-true mortar. 16 unique brick styles.

All 64 blocks are part of a single Better Concretes creative tab and discoverable through the common c:concretes tag, so other mods and datapacks can hook into them without hardcoding our mod id.

Full palette grid — 4 variants × 16 colors

The Chisel

A new iron tool, craftable on a stonecutter from a single iron ingot, opens the Chisel workbench.

Drop any Better Concretes block into the input.
Pick one of the four variants on the right-hand side.
Pull the output — the Chisel takes a small durability hit and you keep every other aspect of the block: color stays, tag membership stays, inventory slot stays.

Every variant ↔ variant conversion is indexed in JEI under the Chiseling category, so recipe viewers show the full conversion graph at a glance.

Chisel tool

What's new in 2.0.0

This is a full rewrite and port, not a patch release.

The original Better Concrete (singular, Forge 1.20.1) was an 83-line quality-of-life mod with a single feature: concrete powder entities would transform into solid concrete when dropped in water. That mod stays where it is.

Better Concretes 2.0.0 (plural, NeoForge 1.21.1) is a content pack:

64 textured blocks with hand-built pixel art at 16×16
Connected-texture (CTM) rendering on all smooth concretes via a custom BakedModel
Custom ChiselRecipe type with its own serializer — datapack-friendly
320 JSON chiseling recipes (every variant → every other variant, per color)
JEI plugin with two categories: Water Transform and Chiseling
Common tag support: c:concretes, c:building_blocks, plus per-color tags
Full translations for English, Português (BR), Português (PT) and Français
Stonecutter recipe for the Chisel itself

The modid changed from betterconcrete to betterconcretes, so this release is not save-compatible with the old mod. Worlds relying on betterconcrete:* blocks will not port automatically.

Installation

Install NeoForge 21.1.193 for Minecraft 1.21.1.
Drop betterconcretes-neoforge-1.21.1-2.0.0.jar into your mods folder.
Optional but recommended: JEI 19.22.0.315+ — it unlocks the Chiseling recipe category.

No config file, no runtime registry dances. It just loads.

Compatibility

JEI: Full integration. No JEI installed? The mod still works; you just lose the recipe viewer.
Common tags (c:concretes, c:building_blocks, c:{color}_concretes): other mods can target our blocks without a hard dependency.
Chipped / Rechiseled: no direct integration yet — both mods lack a public chisel-recipe API in 1.21.1. Dedicated bridges may ship as separate addons.

Known items / roadmap

Port to the next Minecraft version is on the roadmap.
Slabs and stairs are not included in this release — they would multiply the block count to 256+ and the pack is already a dense content drop. On the backlog.
Light-source variants (glowing concrete) are being prototyped.

Credits

Mod author: murilinho145
Textures: hand-built procedural pixel art (Python + Pillow), hue-preserved across the 16-color palette.
Font / logo: adapted from the original 1.20.1 project.