Big Boats

Ship Building

• Build any structure using standard Minecraft blocks
• Ships can be up to 2,000 blocks in size
• 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

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

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
• Collision detection stops ships at terrain and other ships (breaks through plants)
• Ships snap to grid when you dismount for clean docking

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

Multiblock ships have no entry in any recipe book, no ore to find, and nothing in the world that hints they are possible. The first hull anyone builds is the one somebody told them they could build.

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.

The bottle is the real gift. It is a heart of the sea and a glass bottle, and a heart of the sea is otherwise a trophy that sits in a chest for the length of a world.

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.

Optional and guarded: without village-quests the mod behaves exactly as before.

Items

Christening Bottle

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

Recipe (shapeless):

• 1x Heart of the Sea
• 1x Glass Bottle

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

Controls

Technical Details

• Minimum ship size: 2 blocks (helm + at least one other)
• Maximum ship size: 2,000 blocks
• Ships track water surface height as they move
• 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
• Crash recovery: ships sailing when the server stops are force-docked on restart with all blocks restored

Pandorical

Big Boats runs server-side, and Pandorical is required: the server will not load this mod without it. Two things route through it:

• Ship rendering: a ship's blocks are drawn as a single batch-rendered Pandorical structure, posed and moved each tick to follow the ship. The ship entity itself uses Pandorical's "invisible" renderer and draws nothing; only the structure is visible.
• Piloting camera: pull-back distance and third-person-back perspective are pushed to the player through Pandorical's camera API on mount and dismount.

Clients are not the optional half here. A ship is invisible without Pandorical, so a vanilla client cannot see or pilot one at all.

Commands

Known Limitations

• Ladders don't function for climbing while sailing
• Single driver only
• No ship ownership model (any player can mount any ship)