Illegal Items

A Fabric mod for Minecraft 1.21.5 by FROSTYTRIX.

Brings Bedrock Edition's illegal and unobtainable content over to Java Edition: the command-only blocks that were never meant to be held, the items that never left the debug menu, and the entities that never made the jump between editions. Plus a handful of other oddities picked up along the way.

Content so far

The three portal blocks — Nether Portal, End Portal and End Gateway. They exist in vanilla but have no item form, so these are placeable items that put down the real vanilla block.

The nether portal is placed turned to face you, the way it works in Bedrock.

Still water and still lava — real fluids that never spread. You swim and drown in the water, burn in the lava, and it lights and sets fire to its surroundings exactly like the vanilla stuff; it just stays where you put it. They sit in the minecraft:water and minecraft:lava fluid tags so other mods treat them as water and lava, and filling a bucket from one gives an ordinary water or lava bucket.

Redstone dust at every power level, 0 through 15.

Fire and soul fire as placeable items. Placement follows vanilla's own rules, so fire still needs something to burn on and soul fire still needs soul sand or soul soil under it.

A tipped arrow with no potion at all. Vanilla always gives tipped arrows potion contents, so this one looks tipped but flies and hits like a plain arrow. It is in the minecraft:arrows tag, so bows and crossbows fire it normally.

Dyable dogs. Dye can end up on the animal itself instead of its collar, in which case the collar is hidden:

• re-applying the collar's current colour always dyes the coat
• a new colour dyes it 5% of the time
• a new colour on an already-dyed dog strips the coat back to an ordinary collared wolf

Wild wolves are unaffected, and a dyed coat is saved with the wolf.

Anything consumable with Infinity never runs out. Put Infinity on a steak, a potion or a bucket of milk at the anvil and you can use it forever — you still get the hunger, the effects, the sound and the particles, the stack just never shrinks. Endless potions do not leave empty bottles behind either, since vanilla only hands one back when the stack actually got smaller.

An invisible map. It carries the blank map texture in the inventory, but disappears the moment it is in a hand — while still being held up in both hands, which stay perfectly visible.

A spawn egg that spawns nothing, called item.spawn_egg.name. Right-clicking a block swings your arm and achieves precisely nothing.

A hay respawn anchor, from a PhoenixSC thumbnail. It charges from glowstone and glows brighter with each one, but it will not set your spawn and it will not explode.

The Agent from Education Edition. Faithful to how it behaves there, which is mostly by not doing things: it never moves on its own, nothing can hurt it, and it passes straight through blocks and entities. Right-click it to open its 27 slot inventory, which is saved with it. Spawn it with the Agent spawn egg.

Nothing can damage it, but /kill still removes it — otherwise there would be no way to get rid of one. It hovers gently on the spot, taken from its Bedrock animation.

The NPC from Education Edition. No AI at all: it never moves, ignores gravity, cannot be damaged or affected by potions, and will not be pushed around. Commands still remove it.

It stands with its arms folded like a villager and turns its head to watch you.

Sneak and right-click to open the skin picker: a grid of all 32, one slot each, click to wear it. The current one is green and glints, and the icons vary by profession so the grid is scannable. Plain right-click is left free for the dialogue interface. The choice is saved with the NPC.

Steve, Dock's human test mob from Indev 0.31, which lasted about two days.

Cave Game grass and cobblestone, from back when Minecraft was still called that.

The border block from Education Edition. It looks like a wall, but it seals its entire column — floor to sky — so nothing can climb, tunnel, swim or walk over or under it. Non-operators also cannot build or dig anywhere in a sealed column, which includes the border itself. It is unbreakable, immune to pistons, and trails red dust.

It connects to other borders and to vanilla walls, being in the #minecraft:walls tag.

Only operators in creative are waved through — being an operator counts for nothing once you drop into survival, where the border treats you like anybody else. The ender dragon ignores it, and projectiles and explosions treat it as an ordinary wall, so an ender pearl still gets you across.

The Nether Reactor from Pocket Edition, working. Build the shell around the core and use it:

bottom          middle          top
G C G           C . C           . C .
C C C           . R .           C C C
G C G           C . C           . C .

G gold block, C cobblestone, R the core, . air — 4 gold and 14 cobblestone. Note the air: the middle layer's four edges and the top layer's four corners must be empty.

The netherrack spire goes up instantly, then over the next 45 seconds the shell creeps from glowing obsidian to plain obsidian while glowstone, quartz and odds and ends pour out and angry zombified piglins climb after them. When the last block turns, the core is spent.

Breaking a core gives back 3 diamonds and 6 iron ingots.

Pocket Edition also refused to work outside Y 4–96, a limit that came from its 128 block tall worlds. That is dropped here, since it would rule out most of a 1.21.5 world.

The update block (info_update) — Bedrock's "update!" block. An ordinary solid block that breaks by hand and drops itself; the texture is the whole point.

Broken leather armour — a full set with vanilla leather's stats. The items themselves are invisible in the inventory and in hand, and worn they render as the game's own black-and-magenta missing texture, because the equipment asset points at a texture that deliberately does not exist. The two "Missing resource" warnings this logs on each resource reload are expected.

Every mob rides minecarts, the ender dragon and the wither included. Players still board by right-clicking as usual, and minecarts still do not ride each other.

Giant babies. One baby mob in twenty is born the size of an adult while keeping its baby proportions — hitbox and all. Whether a mob is one of them comes from its UUID, so it never changes and needs nothing saved or synced.

Illegal enchanting. At the anvil: any enchantment goes onto any item, mutually exclusive enchantments stack, items that normally can't be enchanted now can be, and the per-enchantment level limit is gone — every combine adds another level. /enchant is lifted the same way, so /enchant @s sharpness 255 works.

The vanilla 255 ceiling is gone too. That one lives in the component that stores enchantments on a stack, and it is enforced in three places, all lifted: Builder.set clamped with Math.min(level, 255), the save codec was Codec.intRange(1, 255), and the constructor threw outside 0–255. The network path needed nothing — the level was already sent as an unbounded VarInt.

Past 255 the vanilla damage and protection formulas start overflowing into nonsense, which is the point.

Levels above 10 have no vanilla lang key and would otherwise display as enchantment.level.255, so the mod renders them as Roman numerals — Sharpness CCLV — falling back to plain digits past 3999, where Roman notation stops being readable.

Everything the mod adds appears in vanilla's Operator Utilities creative tab — the one with the command block and the barrier — rather than in a tab of its own, matching where Bedrock keeps this content. That tab is hidden unless you enable Operator Items Tab in Options → Controls and have operator permission, so turn it on if you can't find the items.