Protection Rebalance

Keep Protection useful without making it the only obvious defensive path.

Protection enchantments are highly efficient and can make maximizing every armor piece feel like the default requirement for defensive progression.

Protection Rebalance applies configurable diminishing returns to Minecraft's combined Enchantment Protection Factor (EPF). Low-level enchantments, enchanted loot, and moderate upgrades remain worthwhile, while heavily stacked or modded Protection requires substantially more investment to approach the normal cap.

Features

• Applies diminishing returns to the combined Protection value used by Minecraft.
• Preserves meaningful early and mid-level enchantment upgrades.
• Reduces the dominance of maximum or heavily stacked Protection.
• Supports applicable Protection enchantments from other mods.
• Can optionally affect non-player entities.
• Server-controlled configuration keeps balance consistent for all players.
• Support for Forge, NeoForge, and Fabric.

Why rebalance Protection?

Defensive enchantments can scale strongly enough to overshadow other ways of surviving combat. When maximum Protection becomes the obvious choice, there is less room for decisions involving:

• Positioning and movement
• Shields and active defense
• Potions, food, and other consumables
• Environmental preparation
• Retreating or changing tactics
• Progressing at a different pace instead of rushing maximum enchantments

Protection Rebalance keeps defensive progression meaningful while allowing these other choices to matter for longer.

How it works

Minecraft first determines which enchantments apply to the incoming damage and combines their raw protection points. Protection Rebalance then converts that raw value into a lower effective value using configurable diminishing returns.

With the default configuration:

• The first 20 raw protection points retain most of their value.
• Additional points provide smaller gains.
• Ordinary enchanted equipment remains useful.
• Maximum Protection is less dominant.
• Very high or modded enchantment levels can still approach the normal cap, but require a much larger investment.

These percentages apply after normal armor calculations, just as Protection does in vanilla.

The configurable transformation is:

effectivePoints =
    min(points, threshold) * reductionBelowThreshold
    + max(0, points - threshold) * reductionAboveThreshold

The resulting value is passed back into Minecraft as effective protection points before the final Protection damage calculation.

Configuration

The server configuration controls:

• Whether the rebalance is enabled
• Whether non-player entities are affected
• The diminishing-returns threshold
• Effective protection gained per point below the threshold
• Effective protection gained per point above the threshold
• Debug messages for testing and balancing

The default values are designed to preserve useful early and mid-level enchantments while reducing the pressure to maximize every armor piece immediately.

Configuration is controlled by the server or singleplayer world, keeping the result consistent for all players.

Mod compatibility

Protection Rebalance is designed to work with enchantments from other mods when they contribute through Minecraft's normal combined Protection calculation.

The mod does not need to recognize individual armor materials, enchantments, or damage types. Minecraft and other mods first decide which enchantments apply; Protection Rebalance then adjusts their combined point value.

Mods that replace the final protection formula are a separate case. For example, Apothic Attributes, used by Apotheosis, changes how much damage reduction each protection point provides, while Protection Rebalance changes the number of effective points passed into that calculation.

These approaches are conceptually complementary, but the combination has not yet been formally tested on all versions. Modpack authors should verify the behavior with their selected mod versions and settings.

Installation and requirements

Supported platforms:

• Minecraft 1.20.1 - Forge
• Minecraft 1.21.1 - NeoForge
• Minecraft 26.1.2 - NeoForge
• Minecraft 26.1.2 - Fabric

Install the file matching both your exact Minecraft version and mod loader.

The mod must be installed on both the client and server. In singleplayer, installing it in the normal client mod folder covers both sides.

Fabric installations also require Fabric API.

Modpacks

You may include the unmodified mod in public or private modpacks without asking for permission.

Protection Rebalance is distributed under the Apache License 2.0.