GearBalance

This mod lets you shape your game the way you want it. It's part of a bigger project of mine, a set of mods that let every player adjust progression and experience to their own taste. GearBalance works fine on its own, but it pairs well with the upcoming HardmodePlus, which brings new challenges and a difficulty beyond Hard.

Where to start

Nothing changes until you change it. Every value starts at vanilla, and if you remove the mod everything goes back to normal.

If you don't feel like setting up dozens of numbers, just load one of the three presets and play:

• VanillaPlus is vanilla without its weak spots. Gold tools finally last, leather holds up, netherite feels like a real upgrade, and the endgame chests are worth opening.
• Progression adds level requirements, armor weight and set bonuses on top. Every tier of gear has to be earned.
• Challenge is for when resources should really matter: less durability, expensive repairs, high requirements and a shield you can't hide behind forever.

You can tweak any preset afterwards and save your own setups in three profiles. Setups can be exported as a file to share with friends or put into a modpack, and imported the same way.

Your gear, your numbers

You can set durability, damage, attack speed, armor and a few other values for 75 items, from wood to netherite with copper included, plus mace, trident, bow, crossbow, shield, shears, fishing rod, brush and wolf armor.

• Tools: durability, damage, attack speed, mining bonus
• Weapons: durability, damage, attack speed
• Armor and wolf armor: durability, armor, toughness, knockback resistance
• Shield: durability, how long an axe disables it, how much damage it blocks
• Bow, crossbow and the rest: durability

Damage and attack speed are the numbers you see in the tooltip, so you can just type in what you want to see there.

This is mostly about the things in vanilla that never made much sense. Gold tools break after a few blocks, so nobody uses them. Netherite is only a small step up from diamond for all the work it takes. Copper is easy to skip. With a few numbers every material gets a real place, or you go the other way and make gear break faster so resources matter more.

Materials

Some things are set per material instead of per item.

Level requirements. Until a player has reached the level once, armor of that material can't be worn, tools mine like your bare hand and weapons don't hurt mobs. Spending levels or dying doesn't lock anything again. In vanilla you can find diamonds in the first hour and skip half the game. With requirements, finding them isn't enough, you have to earn them too. On a server, new players can't just wear the netherite a friend hands them.

Anvil repair. How much one ingot, diamond or plank repairs. Turn it down and broken gear costs something, turn it up and your favorite pickaxe lives longer.

Armor weight. How much slower a full set makes you, each piece carries a quarter of it. Iron and diamond can feel heavy while chainmail and copper stay quick, and netherite is the lightest of the metals as the reward at the end. Leather weighs nothing. Unlike a slowness potion, the view doesn't zoom in.

Set bonuses

Optional and off by default. Wear two pieces of the same material for half the bonus, all four for the full one. You choose the bonus for every material yourself from 18 kinds: movement speed, extra hearts, attack damage, reach, mining speed, less fall damage, shorter burning, luck and more.

The armor tooltip shows the set like you know it from other games: the bonus for 2 and for 4 pieces, green when it's active, grey when it isn't. Two half sets work at the same time, so mixing materials becomes a real decision. Leather boots for the speed, or the last iron piece for the full bonus?

Endgame loot

Optional, three switches for the chests in end cities, bastions, ancient cities and trial chamber vaults:

• More smithing templates: better chances for netherite upgrades in bastions and for the rare trims like spire, ward, silence, bolt and flow.
• More valuable materials: one or two extra stacks that fit the place.
• Replace cheap loot: bones, string, coal, arrows and bread become something worth taking.

Every place has its own loot. Bastions are about gold and netherite, because piglins love gold. End cities give gold, emeralds, shulker shells and potions for the fight instead of piles of iron. Ancient cities hold echo shards, amethyst and experience. The dangerous places finally feel worth it.

Books are never touched, so mods like EnchantPlus that decide where enchanted books come from keep working.

Other stuff

All off by default:

• No "Too Expensive!" at the anvil. The cost is capped instead, 1 to 120 levels, default 39.
• Trident recipe: prismarine crystals, a nautilus shell and sticks. For when the drowned just won't drop one.
• Chainmail armor from iron chains, a real option between leather and iron.
• 1 leather into 4 rabbit hides.
• Leather armor made from rabbit hides instead of leather.
• Zombies can drop leather, with a chance you set yourself. Good for when there are no cows around.

Settings

With Mod Menu (recommended) you get a settings screen, or you edit config/gearbalance.json yourself.

• Tabs for tools, weapons, armor, other items, materials and set bonuses, with item icons
• White means vanilla, yellow means changed but not saved yet, green means saved
• Hover over a field for the vanilla value and the allowed range
• Reset one row with the arrow, or everything with "Reset Vanilla"
• "Mod active" switch to go back to vanilla without losing your settings
• Everything that would lose data asks first

Item values, armor weight and the shield need a restart, the game asks if you want to quit. Everything else works right away, recipes after /reload. If the config file ever breaks, your old one is kept as gearbalance.json.broken.

Compatibility

• Minecraft 26.3, Fabric Loader 0.19.2 or newer
• Needs Fabric API, Mod Menu is optional but highly recommended!
• Client and server. The server config counts, so use the same file on the clients or the tooltips are wrong.
• Only vanilla items and vanilla chests. Gear and loot from other mods aren't changed.

English and German. If you want to add a translation, the language file is small.

GearBalance is free and only available here and on GitHub.

Tested in a modpack with 100+ mods on Minecraft 26.3 – no issues found. See the gallery for the full list

VirusTotal: 1.0.1

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/be78101191375fa601f8c7a5a8e624cc57a693ab2ef0b0f3046a405c93236f97?nocache=1