Free Hand (Dedicated Main Hand)

A new slot in hotbar that can only be filled by player.
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Description

Dedicated Right Hand

A 10th slot for your main hand that nothing you walk over can ever fill. You put things in it. Nothing else does.

Nine slots the world can reach into — and one it cannot.

                                                                                                                                                                             

You walk over a pile of rotten flesh, and now that's what you're swinging.

Every slot in the game is fair game for a pickup. Your inventory fills up, and the next thing off the ground lands in the slot you were holding — usually at the worst possible moment. The hotbar has no notion of a slot you meant to keep.

This adds one. It sits at the right-hand end of your hotbar, and pickups have no route into it: not when your bags are full, not when you're standing on a pile of loot, not ever.

Getting things into it

  • Press the swap key to exchange what you're holding with what's in it. 
  • Drag an item into the slot on your inventory screen

Nothing else has a way in. Turn your back on a hopper, die on a slime, empty your pack into a chest — what's in your right hand is still in your right hand.

                                                                                                                                                                             

Controls:

Switch (Rebindable)

Move your hand to the dedicated slot

Swap (Rebindable)

Works just like swapping an item to vanilla off-hand. Trade what's in the dedicated slot for what's on your hotbar. It moves the items and nothing else — your selection stays where it was, whichever side you press it from.

Scroll wheel

Scrolling off the end of the hotbar lands on it, and scrolling back leaves. Enabled by default; turn it off if you'd rather the slot could only be reached deliberately.

Both keys appear in Options → Controls under Dedicated Right Hand, alongside everything else, and can be bound to a mouse button as readily as a key.

                                                                                                                                                                             

What it is

A real slot, not a decorated one

Any item, no rules

It is a main-hand slot, so everything works there exactly as it works on the hotbar: attack damage, mining speed, eating, placing, drawing a bow, tool durability, cooldowns, and items that tick like clocks and compasses. No shield-only restriction, no off-hand behaviour borrowed from anywhere.

Seen by everyone

Rendered in first and third person like any held item, because it is your held item. Other players see the gun in your hands, not an empty fist.

Seen by other mods

Part of your player's item handler, so mods that read your inventory find it: a gun mod reloads from ammunition kept in your right hand and counts it on the HUD. Mods may take from it and top up a stack already there; none of them can put something new in an empty hand.

It stays put

Saved with the rest of your inventory. It survives logging out, respawning, portals and dimension changes, and it drops on death and clears with /clear like every other slot.

One hand, one highlight

While you're using the dedicated slot the hotbar stops drawing its own selection ring, so the screen never tells you that you're holding two things at once.

Drawn from the game's own art

The frame on the hotbar and the slot on the inventory screen are the game's own textures, lifted from the places the game already draws them — so they line up to the pixel and follow any resource pack that restyles your GUI.

                                                                                                                                                                             

 

No dependencies

Standalone. No Curios, no library mod, no accessory system. Drop it in and it works.

Nothing renumbered

The slot is added after the off hand rather than squeezed into the middle, so every slot number that already meant something still means it. Nothing that addresses your armour or off hand by index starts reading the wrong one.

No cosmetics

No custom models, no bespoke animations, no character-model changes, no persistent state riding along with your skin. It is a slot.

Not a second off hand

The off hand is still the off hand and behaves exactly as it always has. This is a second main hand, and only one of the two is ever in use.

                                                                                                                                                                             

Settings

Four of them, and sensible without touching any

Setting Default What it does
dedicatedhand-client.toml
slot_x 0 Move the on-screen slot sideways, in pixels. Negative is left.
slot_y 0 Move it up or down. Negative is up.
scroll_to_it true Reach the slot by scrolling past the end of the hotbar, as well as by its key.
dedicatedhand-common.toml
keep_drops_when_full true In creative, leave a dropped item on the ground when there's no room for it, instead of destroying it as you walk over. Off restores vanilla exactly.

 

                                                                                                                                                                             

 

Requirements

Install

Minecraft 1.20.1 Forge 47+

Needed on both sides in multiplayer — the server has to know which hand you're using, or your damage, your mining and what everyone else sees would all come from the wrong one. Single-player needs nothing but the file.

The Free Hand (Dedicated Main Hand) Team

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Efec99
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