Better Ladders - pandorical

Vanilla's ladder is one plane with a ladder drawn on it, which is why a ladder seen edge-on is not there at all. This is the same picture given depth: two rails standing a pixel off the wall, four rungs between them.

It is vanilla's own texture, rearranged. Each face takes the part of block/ladder.png that already shows that part - rails from the texture's rail columns, rungs from its rung rows - so a resource pack that retextures ladders still retextures these.

Ladders Hold Themselves Up

Vanilla wants a solid face behind every rung, which turns a climb down a shaft into a building job: you build a wall you did not want, to hang a ladder on, in a hole you are about to leave.

Here a ladder stays where you put it. Placed in open air it takes the direction you were facing; placed on a wall it still takes the wall's, because a ladder that has a wall should agree with it. And a ladder whose wall is later mined stays hanging rather than popping off.

Rope Ladder

Its own block, not a ladder wearing a different name: rope rails with slats between them, a good deal quicker and quieter to cut than nailed timber. Six string down the sides and a stick in the middle make two, which is a rope ladder's whole bill of materials.

Throw it at a wall or off a ledge and it unrolls downward, one piece of the stack per rung, until it reaches the ground or you run out. It takes its time about it: the first rung lands with the click and the rest follow it down, quickening as they go the way anything falling does, each one rattling as it lands, and the whole rope thuds and kicks up dust when it meets the floor. All of that is the server's doing, so a vanilla client sees and hears it too.

• Off a wall it hangs on the face you clicked, the way one placed by hand would.
• Off the top of a block it goes over the edge you are looking across, which is what anybody standing at a cliff holding a rope is about to do.
• It stops at the first thing in its way - ground, a chest, somebody's build - rather than pushing past it, so a rope thrown down a shaft lands on the floor of the shaft.

Cut it anywhere and everything under it comes down. The only thing holding the rest of the rope up was the rung you just took, so the whole drop lands on the floor as rope ladder again - which is also how you get one back down off a cliff you have finished with, in one hit rather than sixty. Cut it while it is still falling, or put something in its way, and the part that never got down lands beside it as pieces.

Nothing is lost doing it. Every rung dropped is a rung returned, so the coil and what it becomes are the same thing in two shapes.

This mod is also the reason a ladder needs no wall, and the rope needs that more than anything else does: thrown into open air, it stays where it lands.

Pandorical

Better Ladders runs server-side, and Pandorical is required there: the server will not load this mod without it. It ships the 3D ladder model and the rope ladder's own block, item and model through Pandorical's content sync.

The Pandorical mod must be installed client-side to see either. Without it a client sees vanilla's flat ladder, and ladders standing unsupported still work, because that is decided on the server. The rope ladder is a real registered block, so a client without Pandorical cannot render it and cannot receive chunks containing one.