Better Gold 1.4.0 Changelog

TL;DR: Three new metals — Flamegold, Voodoogold and Thundergold — arrive with three custom status effects and a full set of materials, building blocks, tools, armor and armor trims. The creative inventory is now a single page with five banner sections, SturdyGold has moved onto the shared metal framework, and a batch of bugs has been fixed.

Added

Three new metals (24 items + 11 blocks each)

Each metal is a complete line:

• Materials: raw ore, ingot, nugget and an upgrade smithing template.
• Building blocks: block, bricks, brick stairs, brick slab, brick wall, pillar, door, trapdoor, bars, chain and lantern (11 blocks).
• Tools: sword, axe, pickaxe, shovel and hoe, plus a Farmer's Delight knife.
• Armor: helmet, chestplate, leggings and boots.

Together the three metals add 72 items and 33 blocks; counting the signature materials and the three metal knives, 1.4 adds 78 new items (128 → 206 items, 43 → 76 blocks).

Shared stats

All three sets share enchantability 24, toughness 6 and 15% knockback resistance, and wearing any single piece makes piglins neutral.

Three custom status effects

• High Burn: the target keeps burning and takes level + 1 fire damage every second (2 per second at level 1, 3 at level 2), stacking without limit. Every hit from Flamegold gear adds a level and tops the duration up to 36 seconds. Entities that die with High Burn (or while genuinely on fire) drop smelted versions of their smeltable loot — raw meat becomes cooked meat.
• Voodoo: hits from Voodoogold gear add a level, over a 6-second window that is never refreshed (each hit only raises the level). Every point of damage the target takes inside that window is banked at 80%, and when the effect expires naturally it deals banked × (1 + 0.8 × level) magic damage (×1.8 at level 1, ×2.6 at level 2). Removing the effect early, the target dying, the entity leaving the world or a world reload all discard the bank with no payout.
• Tremble: −1 attack damage and −0.1 attack speed per level, applied for 16 seconds by Thundergold hits and retaliation.

Both Voodoo coefficients are configurable in config/bettergold-common.toml (voodooStoreRatio, default 0.8, and voodooReleasePerLevel, default 0.8).

Building block contact effects

Stepping on, standing against, breaking or right-clicking any block of these metals applies a 6-second effect, to players and mobs alike:

An effect that is already active is never refreshed: it runs its full duration, and if you are still in contact a fresh 6 seconds is applied afterwards.

Tool traits

• Flamegold — auto-smelting: blocks harvested with Flamegold gear drop their smelted result (logs → charcoal, ores → ingots, sand → glass, potatoes → baked potatoes…). It looks up the actual smelting/blasting recipe, so recipes added by other mods or datapacks work automatically.
• Thundergold — lightning on hit: striking a target summons a visual-only lightning bolt at its position (no fire, no destroyed drops, no vanilla lightning damage). It deals 6 extra damage to every living entity within a 1.5-block box (3×3) and applies 16 seconds of Tremble, and it never hits the wielder. Vanilla lightning conversions (villager → witch, pig → zombified piglin, creeper → charged creeper) are still applied. The thunder sound uses the mod's own network packet by default, with three selectable modes in the config.

Armor resistance and retaliation

Armor trims

Each metal adds a new armor trim material (using its ingot) — flamegold, voodoogold and thundergold — each with its own 8×1 color palette. The mod now ships 5 trim materials.

Signature materials

• Blazing Rod: 1 gunpowder + 8 blaze rods; the key ingredient of Flamegold's raw ore recipe.
• Voodoo Feather: dropped by witches (36% base chance, or 42% with Looting I and +6% per further level); 1 voodoo feather + 1 feather + 1 fermented spider eye + 1 crying obsidian yields 2 voodoo feathers.
• Amethyst Energy Dust: 4 amethyst clusters + 4 redstone + 1 grindstone (shapeless) — the grindstone is returned to you.

Changed

• The creative inventory is now a single page. The four 1.3 tabs (Blocks & Materials / Food & Drinks / Gear & Tools / Farmer's Delight) are merged into one "Better Gold" page split by five banners: Materials / Building / Food / Gear / Farmer's Delight. With Farmer's Delight installed the page holds 206 items (34 / 66 / 28 / 47 / 31); without it, 4 sections and 175 items.
• SturdyGold moved onto the shared metal framework. Its materials, building blocks, tools, armor and upgrade template are now produced by the same registration path as the other three metals. Item ids, stats, recipes, tags and language keys are unchanged from 1.3 (durability 6144, mining speed 10, enchantability 30, armor durability 1221 / 1776 / 1665 / 1443).
• Golden figurines can be smelted. The creeper, enderman and toad figurines now smelt or blast into 1 gold ingot (200 ticks in a furnace, 100 in a blast furnace).
• Language files: 101 new entries in both en_us and zh_cn (261 keys each now).

Fixed

• Metal knives did not trigger their metal's on-hit effect. The knives are registered by the Farmer's Delight integration module and were never added to the metal index, so "which metal is this knife?" always came back empty and High Burn, Voodoo and the lightning strike never fired. Native and integration items are now indexed together.
• Voodoogold blocks never actually dealt poison damage. The contact check re-applied poison every 10 ticks and kept resetting its duration back to the full 6 seconds, while poison only ticks at specific remaining durations — so you carried the effect forever without ever losing health. An already-active effect is no longer refreshed.
• Flamegold sword texture artifact fixed.
• Witch voodoo feather loot injection never loaded because of a wrong condition id; corrected.

Compatibility (all optional)

• Farmer's Delight: adds the Farmer's Delight creative section (31 items), four metal knives (including the SturdyGold knife) and their smithing upgrade recipes plus knife tags. The mod loads normally without it, and none of that content appears.
• Immersive Engineering: adds a Metal Press recipe — 4 Golden Cowries + Gear Mold → 1 Golden Cowrie Mold (3200 FE). It is gated behind a datapack mod_loaded condition, so it simply does not load when Immersive Engineering is absent.

Requirements

• Minecraft: 1.21.1
• NeoForge: 21.1.228 or newer
• Java: 21
• Mod id: bettergold; MIT license; by hjmmd_8
• Optional: Farmer's Delight (≥ 1.3.1) for the integration content