CBC Enchanced Shells [Create Big Cannons]

# CBC Enchanced Shells 1.5.0 — The Shader Shells Update ⚡

**Minecraft 1.21.1 · NeoForge 21.1+ · requires Create Big Cannons 5.11.4+** · optional: FTB Chunks (claimed chunks are never modified), Create Aeronautics / Sable (ship-mounted racks).

## TL;DR

- **5 shader shells rebuilt** at the level of the Singularity: **Plasma** (artificial star → nova), **Gravitational** (neutron-star gravity well), **Vortex** (real tornado), **Disintegration** (hexagonal dissolution field), **Singularity** (Gargantua-style black hole). New post shaders, a world-space FX companion, synced server destruction, camera shake, flashes and looping sounds. Every tier (Mk.I → Mk.V) changes size, colour and intensity.

- **New textures** for the 25 shader shells (no more yellow placeholder).

- **New: the Missile Rack** 🚀: a 16-tube launcher built from 4 blocks, **6 missile families × Mk.I–V (30 missiles)** including Heavy (2×2), Anti-Air seeker and Cluster. Works with Mechanical Arms, funnels and hoppers, on the Missile Mount and on Create Aeronautics ships.

- **Fixed:** the black spot on screen during nuclear explosions.

The four remaining shader shells (Plasma, Gravitational, Vortex, Disintegration) are rebuilt at the level of the Singularity: a new post shader for each, a world-space companion in the FX engine (debris, smoke, fire, voxels, lightning — zero particles), a server-side destruction synced on the same timeline, camera shake, flashes and looping sounds. Every tier changes size, colour and intensity.

### Fixed

- **Black spot on screen during nuclear explosions.** Two causes, both fixed: over-lit smoke (backlight and lightning push the colour above 1.0, and Minecraft wraps an unclamped vertex colour of 1.01 to almost black) and the retinal afterimage, drawn without blending depending on the previous GUI state. Every FX vertex colour is now clamped; the afterimage is removed (its `afterimage` client option is gone).

### Plasma Shell — artificial star

- A star is born above the impact in a **fusion ignition** (three arms of plasma spiralling into a point that ignites, a ring of light racing out, lens flare), with convection granules, sunspots, limb darkening, a corona with streamers, magnetic prominence loops and coronal mass ejections. It lights the terrain around it in real time.

- A white-hot vitrification front races outward; behind it the ground melts and cools into dark glass laced with lava cracks. Fire tongues run along the front, smoke plumes rise from the burnt land lit from below, water boils into steam.

- Late in its life the star swells into a red giant, collapses and goes **nova**: a filamentary shell and radial jets of fire, a ground shock with a dust wall, a fire storm on the burnt land, a rising smoke ring and glowing ash.

- Server: surface-only vitrification (the old version scanned up to ~11 million blocks per wave at Mk.V), searing heat near the star, nova blast and fires. Duration 10 s (Mk.I) to 18 s (Mk.V).


*Plasma Shell, Mk.I to Mk.V: fusion ignition, artificial star, vitrification front, nova*

### Gravitational Shell — gravity well

- It forms in an **implosion**: spiral arms of light winding into a point. No longer a second black hole: a spinning **neutron-star core** with a wide glowing halo hovers over the impact with sweeping pulsar beams (lighthouse flashes when one crosses you).

- Spacetime sinks into a glowing funnel grid on the terrain that flows into the well and twists around it; gravitational waves ripple out; the crushed ground cracks.

- Rock is torn out of the ground, levitates into a flattened orbiting disk and spirals into the core; dust motes float up, dust is dragged across the ground.

- Crush phase (everything accelerates inward), then a **rebound** blast throws the survivors out with a ring of dust.

- Server: block compression walks only the shell (was the whole box every wave), stronger pull during the crush, rebound throw.


*Gravitational Shell, Mk.I to Mk.V: implosion, neutron-star core, pulsar beams, funnel grid, rebound*

### Vortex Shell — tornado

- A volumetric condensation funnel (lit by the sky, dark at night) descends from a rotating wall cloud and touches down, with a debris and dust sheath at the base, a glowing energy core, and a rope-out phase where it thins, snakes and lifts off.

- A wide two-layer wall cloud with a lowering collar and scud sucked into it, lightning (thunder included), a rain and hail curtain on the rear flank, debris spiralling up the funnel and flung out, dust skirt and ground inflow, touchdown and final dust bursts. The loop sound follows the tornado.

- Server: no block capture before the touchdown or after the rope-out; the final burst is silent (no TNT particles) with a scoured pit.


*Vortex Shell, Mk.I to Mk.V: wall cloud, touchdown, debris sheath, rope-out*

### Disintegration Shell — dissolution field

- The core charges with electric arcs, discharges, and a hemispherical field with a hexagonal lattice sweeps the land. Behind its front, matter turns to light block by block (aligned on the block grid) and rises as block-sized glowing voxels; branching fissures glow cyan with molten gold edges and cool down; pillars of light rise from them.

- Server: the trenches now follow exactly the cracks drawn by the shader (same noise, mirrored in Java), branches included; plants, leaves and snow are vaporised inside the field; living things caught by the front are disintegrated. Duration 10 s to 18 s.


*Disintegration Shell, Mk.I to Mk.V: charge, hexagonal field, voxels, glowing fissures*

### Singularity Shell — black hole

- The hole now **hovers over the impact** (0.6 radius up) with a **pure black shadow** and a razor-thin **photon ring**; at full size its horizon eats a bowl into the ground (the server follows the same centre).

- **Accretion disk** almost edge-on, white-hot inside, the tier colour, then dull red and a cold dust lane; Doppler beaming makes the side turning toward you brighter and bluer, and its far side is **lensed into arcs over and under the shadow** (the Gargantua look). It spins up wildly during the collapse.

- Around the hole the sky gives way to a **window onto starry space**; the disk **lights the land** in its colours and the rim of the bowl glows white-hot; the ground is combed into **spiral dust lanes** streaming toward it; seismic rings are now glowing cracks.

- **Tidal streams**: rock torn out of a ring of ground rises in twisting streams up to the disk, heating up on the way; debris orbits in the disk plane before falling in.

- **Twin jets** (from Mk.II) are two plasma strands twisting around a white core, knots racing outward; at the **release** they shoot far, a shock ring is ejected in the disk plane, the disk matter is flung out and a dust wall sweeps the land.

- Without the post shader (Iris / Oculus) a fallback hole is drawn (black disc, photon ring, glowing disk, lit ground). Screen warping stays off by default (client option).


*Singularity Shell, Mk.I to Mk.V: hovering black hole, photon ring, lensed accretion disk, jets*

### New textures for the shader shells

- The 25 shader shells no longer use the yellow HE placeholder: **Plasma** (white ceramic, sun emblem, glowing copper nose), **Gravitational** (midnight blue, spacetime grid sinking into a bright core), **Vortex** (storm teal with helical bands), **Disintegration** (matte black, cyan hex grid and a glowing crack), **Singularity** (starry violet-black, black hole with its disk). The tier shows on the driving band (tier colour) and as 1 to 5 lit pips above it.


*New textures for the 25 shader shells (tier band + 1 to 5 pips)*

### New — Missile Rack 🚀


*Missile Rack: head + 3 tubes, red lamp until formed, green when complete*

A compact 16-tube launcher for small missiles, built from 4 blocks placed by hand.

- **Missile Rack Head** (the loading face, 4×4 tubes) + **3 Missile Rack Tubes** aligned behind it. Tubes placed against the head or another tube take its orientation. The rack is formed only when complete: green lamp when formed, red otherwise. Any of the 6 directions, including vertical (launch silo).

- **6 missile families, each in Mk.I to Mk.V** (30 missiles; 1 to 5 white bands on the body, every stat grows with the tier). Detailed models: octagonal body, copper ogive, canards, swept fins, flared nozzle, markings per type.

  - **Small HE**, **Small Incendiary** (sets the impact area ablaze) and **Small Fragmentation** (a burst of fragments raking everything around).

  - **Heavy Missile**: 6 px calibre, 1.75 block long, takes an aligned **2×2 group of tubes** (up to 4 per rack, nose sticking out of the face); slow, ballistic, a much bigger blast.

  - **Anti-Air Missile**: a seeker that chases **other ships** (Create Aeronautics / Sable) and **hostile flying mobs** ahead of it, with a limited turn rate and a proximity fuze; it bursts in the air in a sphere of fragments, and destroys itself in the air when it finds nothing. It **never targets players**, nor anything on the ship it was fired from, nor tamed or owner-allied mobs (the rack remembers who placed it).

  - **Cluster Missile**: opens shortly before reaching the ground and scatters 6 to 18 bomblets that go off on contact.


*6 missile families, Mk.I to Mk.V (1 to 5 white bands), heavy 2x2 missiles, cluster carrier and bomblets*

  - Recipes: Mk.I from missile bodies (cast iron, gunpowder, copper) + packed gunpowder / blaze powder / iron nuggets / cast iron block + packed gunpowder (heavy) / compass + redstone (anti-air) / gunpowder + iron ingot (cluster). Mk.II-V: 4 missiles of the previous tier around cast iron ingot / diamond / emerald / diamond block → 4 (heavy: 1 + core → 1). Tooltips list the stats.

  - Impacts are drawn by the FX engine (no Minecraft particles), sized per missile: heavy blasts, black anti-air air bursts, small bomblet blasts.

- **Loading**: right-click the front face with a missile (one tube per click), sneak + empty hand takes the last one back. Every loaded missile is visible in its tube. Comparator output = number of tubes in use.


*Loading: one missile per click, Mechanical Arm, funnels and hoppers; every loaded missile is visible*

- **Automation**: the **Create Mechanical Arm** deposits missiles into the front face (dedicated interaction point), funnels, chutes and hoppers too. On Create Aeronautics, Sable keeps arm points only when the arm and the rack are on the **same** sub-level.

- **Firing**: a redstone pulse on the head **or on any of its tubes** fires the whole salvo along the front face, one missile every 3 ticks with a slight spread (top tubes first). Missiles burn for a moment (longer at higher tiers), then fall ballistically; launched from an Aeronautics structure they follow the structure's real orientation.


*Firing: redstone salvo, vertical silo, Missile Mount aiming with Create rotation*

- **Impacts drawn by the FX engine, zero Minecraft particles**: flash, fireball, shock ring and dust wall on the ground, clods of earth, a rolling smoke cloud drifting downwind. Incendiary leaves flames burning on the ground with embers, fragmentation throws a hail of bright fragment streaks. The server explosion (damage, block breaking) runs with invisible particles.


*Missile impacts drawn by the FX engine, zero Minecraft particles*

- **On the Missile Mount**: a formed rack (any block of it on the assembly point, any orientation) assembles on the mount, aims with Create rotation and fires its salvo on the fire signal. The rack stays mounted and **reloads while mounted**: right-click any block of it with a missile (sneak + empty hand takes one back), or let **Mechanical Arms, funnels, chutes and hoppers deposit into the mount block**, which feeds its rack. The loaded missiles show in the mounted tubes.

- Config (`missile_rack` in the common config): block damage, explosion power, salvo interval. Claimed chunks are never modified.

### Technical

- One shared timeline (`ShaderShellSpec`) for the server, the shader and the FX engine.

- When the post shader is unavailable (Iris / Oculus), each shell now draws a fallback in the FX engine instead of detonating invisibly.

- `/cbcesfx plasma_mk1..5`, `gravity_mk1..5`, `vortex_mk1..5`, `disintegration_mk1..5` preview the effects.

- The post shader is validated with the Khronos reference compiler before release, and every effect (post shader + the real FX classes run headless) is checked on an offline render bench.