Big Boats

Ship Building

• Build any structure using standard Minecraft blocks
• A plain helm holds a ship of up to 100 blocks; the Tonnage enchantment on the helm raises that to 400, 1,000 and 2,000 blocks
• Supports block entities (chests, furnaces, signs); contents persist
• Item frames and paintings travel with the ship and restore on dock
• Doors, trapdoors, and fence gates remain interactive while sailing
• Cushions stay aboard while sailing, and sitting on one is a way to ride as a passenger. Docked, each is back on the block it was placed on, whichever way the ship now faces
• With chest-utils installed, a painted chest keeps its colour through a voyage

The Helm

• Craft and place a Helm block as your ship's wheel
• The helm determines the ship's forward direction
• Right-click the helm to board your ship; right-click it again while piloting to stop and dock
• Enchant the helm with Tonnage to command a bigger ship

Christening

• Craft a Christening Bottle to launch your ship
• Throw the bottle at any part of your ship structure
• Name the bottle in an anvil to name your ship

Sailing

• WASD controls: W/S for forward/back thrust, A/D to rotate
• Ships have momentum-based physics; they accelerate and coast
• Speed builds on open water: a ship reaches harbour speed (about 3.6 blocks a second) in a second or so, handy for channels and docks, and keeps gathering speed while W stays held, to about 16 blocks a second after some sixteen seconds of clear water. Let go and it slows back to harbour speed in three or four seconds. Reversing tops out at harbour speed
• A keel: a ship barely slides sideways, so at speed it turns where it points rather than drifting
• Collision detection stops ships at terrain and other ships (breaks through plants, coral and loose rock)
• Ships snap to grid when you dismount for clean docking
• Anyone standing on the deck is carried along, through the snap to the grid included. On a current Pandorical client you walk the deck you see: your client holds you on it and moves you with it
• Coral and loose rock give way: coral, coral fans and sea pickles are knocked aside like kelp, and natural terrain (coral block, stone, dirt, sand, gravel, clay, sandstone, magma) held on by no more than two faces breaks when the hull hits it, so reefs and shallows can be threaded. Anything more firmly set, or built rather than grown, stops the ship
• A ship holds the height it was christened at
• A dry hold: below the waterline she is air, not sea. Walk the hold, see across it and breathe in it while she sails; an open boat stays dry too, as long as her sides stand above the water, and what was dry at sea is still dry when she docks

Working at Sea

A ship at sea is still a working ship. Walk her deck and use what is on it the way you would ashore:

• Doors, trapdoors and fence gates open and shut
• Chests, barrels, shulker boxes, dispensers, droppers, hoppers, crafters and lecterns open, and what you put in comes ashore with her
• Crafting tables, anvils, stonecutters, smithing tables, grindstones, looms and cartography tables work, and an enchanting table counts the bookshelves aboard
• Furnaces, smokers, blast furnaces and brewing stands keep cooking while she sails, and hoppers keep feeding them
• Bells ring and note blocks play
• Ladders and vines climb
• A chest locked with Chest Utils 1.1.1 or newer stays locked at sea and is still locked to its owner wherever she docks, and a Loot Ender loot chest aboard opens as each player's own copy

Clicking blocks at sea needs Pandorical on the client. Other mods' blocks join in through the pandorical:usable_on_structures block tag (to be clicked) and big-boats-justfatlard:ticks_at_sea (to keep running while she sails).

Docking System

• Ships auto-dock when you dismount (places real blocks back)
• Ships auto-undock when you board (converts to a rendered Pandorical structure)
• Block absorption: Small structures touching your ship may be absorbed when undocking
• Grounding detection: Can't sail if connected to a large landmass. Touching means the shapes meet: a slab beside a slab of the other half, or a block a step above a bottom slab, is not a connection
• Occupied check: Only one pilot at a time
• Structure damage detection: Can't undock if the ship structure is broken

Learning It

The helm turns up in your recipe book as soon as you are holding planks, a stick or an iron ingot, which is the one hint the game gives you on its own. Nothing else points at ships: no ore to find, no structure to stumble on, and no way to guess that a helm turns the hull around it into a boat.

So with village-quests installed, a fisherman who trusts you (50 reputation) will sell you the makings: 32 planks, a helm and a christening bottle for 24 emeralds, and the two recipes to go with them.

This is a shop rather than a quest, because nothing here needs doing. The kit is deliberately not a ship: enough to make the idea concrete, nowhere near enough to skip the building.

Items

Christening Bottle

Thrown item that converts a block structure into a sailable ship entity.

Recipe (shapeless):

• 1x Glass Bottle

A christening that fails drops the bottle back with the reason.

Helm Block

The ship's wheel, required for every ship. Place it facing the direction you want to sail.

Recipe:

    [S]
[S][I][S]
[P][P][P]

S = Stick, I = Iron Ingot, P = Any Planks

Tonnage

An enchantment for the helm, from the enchanting table, books, loot and trades. It sets how large a ship the helm can hold together, including blocks absorbed later:

The rating is kept when the helm is placed, and a broken helm drops with its Tonnage. A bottle thrown at a ship too big for its helm is refused, with a message saying so.

Controls

Technical Details

• Minimum ship size: 2 blocks (helm + at least one other)
• Maximum ship size: 100 blocks on a plain helm, 2,000 at Tonnage III
• Ship lighting: Light-emitting blocks on ships place invisible light blocks that move with the ship
• Collision checks all block corners to prevent clipping
• Hull-only collision optimization skips interior blocks
• Blocks at sea: while a ship sails, her blocks answer from coordinates far above any build height (y 1600 and up, x from 30,000,000), one stretch per ship. Nothing is placed there and no chunk loads; it is where a log line about a block at sea will point
• Crash recovery: ships sailing when the server stops are force-docked on restart with all blocks restored. A ship whose undock was interrupted part-way resolves to whichever side of that it had reached, rather than being saved mid-transition

Pandorical

Big Boats goes on the server only, and Pandorical is required there and on every player's client: the helm and the christening bottle are new items, and a client without Pandorical has no entry for them. Pandorical is also what draws a ship and carries a player on its deck, so a client without it, or with an older Pandorical, sees no ship at all.

Commands

Known Limitations

• Blocks that need a redstone signal, or that grow, wait until she docks
• Single driver only