Immersive Tool Aging

Dynamic dirt, blood, rust, and combat grime – fully procedural, fully gameplay-integrated, and compatible with almost every item out of the box.

Weapon gets progressively dirty

Key Features

Procedural Dirt & Damage (Mod-Friendly, Zero Setup)

No resource packs required: overlays are generated at runtime using noise and pixel hashing.
Works on tools, weapons, armor, and shields (including banner patterns).
Over 15 tracked substances: dirt, sand, snow, ash, blood, slime, ink, rust, burns, and more.
Supports emissive fluids like Glow Ink, Warden blood, and Enderman blood.

Helmet and covered in blood resting on a wooden block

Blood Has Consequences

Visual blood directly influences gameplay and mob behavior:

The Scent of Blood: At night, heavily bloodied players may (very rarely!) attract wolf packs.
Animals or Villager run; if you are covered in blood.
Monsters could smell you from further away.
Warden Repulsion: Most hostile mobs avoid players covered in Warden blood.
Wither Aura: High Wither blood creates a damaging debuff aura.
End Glitches: End blood on held items can randomly teleport the player.
Harmful Substances Attacking with dirty weapons may apply minor effects on hit targets.

Combat Splatter, Decals & Footprints

Hits splatter mob-specific fluids on gear and terrain.
Blood puddles form; step in them to dirty your boots leave temporary bloody footprints.
Squids release ink that inflicts Blindness or Glowing.

Recommended image:
A battleground with puddles, footprints, and varied mob blood colors.

Environment-Aware Dirt

Dropped items absorb fluids and pick up environmental dirt from blocks they touch.
Loot on spawned mobs comes with biome-appropriate aging.
Slot-specific stains: boots develop gradients from grass; helmets and chestplates show patchy scuffs.

Rust, Burns & Maintenance

Metallic gear rusts when exposed to water or rain, increasing durability loss.
Water removes dirt, but Rust and Burns require a Grindstone.
Dirty food applies themed debuffs (e.g., Mining Fatigue from sand, teleportation from End blood).

Cleaning & Inventory Logic

Clean items by rain, swimming, Water Cauldrons, or splash water bottles.
Splash bottles also dissolve ground decals.
Inventory contagion keeps items stackable: merging stacks applies the highest dirt level.

Performance & Compatibility

Texture overlays are cached for minimal overhead.
A central performance handler culls old decals and footprints under server load.
Sodium detection prevents conflicts: overlays disable automatically if Sodium runs without Indium.

Design Philosophy

Immersive Tool Aging aims for immersion, mechanical relevance, and low friction.

Universal procedural generation: Works with any item without configs or external assets.
Performance-first: Caching and adaptive culling protect FPS/TPS.
Anti-tedium inventory: Smart stacking avoids clutter and lots of stacks of 1 item that can't stack.
Form follows function: Visual wear reflects actual mechanics (rust = faster durability loss). But in a organic way and without to much impact.
Diegetic interaction: Cleaning and repair happen through world actions, not menus.
Context-aware and lore-driven: Mob fluids and environmental materials behave uniquely. There are a lot of suprises and interactions that just make sense. (If you've got more ideas join my Discord!!)
Soft-failure integration: Features blend into vanilla logic and disable gracefully if needed.

Planned Direction

Expected future focuses include:

Configuration options
Additional environmental substances and unique mob fluids.
More mob behavior tied to biological contaminants, maybe villagers give bad trades if you are dirty.
Blood dripping from your armor or tools if you've freshly gotten them dirty.
Wetness and wet steps, imagine leaving water on your carpet after you've came home during a storm. Along with water puddles you can step on that reflect light like you'd expect.
More item compatability. Doesnt support modded items that have their own 3d models too well if at all.
Doesnt support vanilla items like: Tridend, Skulls or Playerheads (Bloody skulls would be so cool)
Explosion decals
Some more unique features for unique monster blood.
Player's skins could get dirty

About the Project

Immersive Tool Aging is created by an individual developer.
This is my first released mod, built to push immersion as far as possible while maintaining performance and a vanilla(ish) feel.

Immersive Tool & Armor Degradation