Just Excavators

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📖 About

Move more terrain without turning Minecraft into a one-click quarry.

Just Excavators adds specialized area-mining shovels designed for predictable, vanilla-style terrain work. Choose a profile for the shape you need, aim at the surface you want to excavate, and let the server process every valid block through Minecraft's normal breaking flow.

The mod preserves vanilla loot, XP, durability, enchantments, permissions, and game-mode restrictions. Hold sneak at any time to disable area mining and break only the block you selected.

📚 Features

⛏️ Four Excavation Profiles

Each Excavator carries one of four specialized profiles:

The face you hit determines the area's orientation. Deep profiles extend inward from that face, so floors, ceilings, and walls behave consistently.

🧱 Six Tool Materials

Build Excavators from Stone, Copper, Iron, Gold, Diamond, and Netherite.

Basic, Deep, Wide, and Advanced profiles are stored directly on the tool. Upgrading a Diamond Excavator to Netherite preserves its profile, durability state, custom name, enchantments, and installed Enhancement Cores.

🔧 Enhancement Workbench

Every Excavator has two fixed Enhancement Core slots managed through the Enhancement Workbench.

• Install, remove, or replace Cores without recreating the tool.
• Invalid pairs and duplicate Cores are rejected.
• A built-in compatibility panel shows which combinations are allowed.
• All changes are server-authoritative.
• An optional built-in resource pack restores the vanilla-style Workbench interface.

✨ Enhancement Cores

Customize how blocks and drops are processed:

• Silk Core: uses vanilla Silk Touch loot behavior without permanently enchanting the tool.
• Collector Core: sends drops to your inventory and leaves overflow in the world.
• Smelting Core: processes drops through current furnace recipes.
• Filter Core: limits additional targets to the same block type as the center block.
• Void Core: destroys drops and block XP.

Compatible pairs include Silk with Collector, Smelting, or Filter; Collector with Smelting or Filter; Smelting with Filter; and Void with Filter. Fortune remains incompatible with the Silk Core.

🛡️ Vanilla-Friendly Area Mining

Just Excavators does not replace the normal block-breaking lifecycle.

• Only shovel-mineable blocks are included in the additional area.
• Protected, unbreakable, fluid-containing, excluded, and block-entity targets are skipped.
• Each successfully broken block consumes durability normally.
• Unbreaking, Mending, Efficiency, Fortune, loot tables, XP, and statistics continue to work through vanilla systems.
• Area mining starts only after the center block is successfully broken.
• Holding sneak always limits the action to a single block.

🏆 Progression and Advancements

Craft each profile directly, progress through Deep, Wide, and Advanced Excavation Cores, and upgrade Diamond tools to Netherite at the Smithing Table. A separate advancement branch introduces the Enhancement Workbench and challenges you to install compatible Core pairs and collect all five Enhancement Cores.

📦 Installation

➡️ Required on client and server

➡️ Requires Minecraft 26.3

➡️ Requires Fabric Loader 0.19.5+

➡️ Requires Fabric API

➡️ Requires Java 25+

JustHammers is supported as an optional compatibility scenario but is not required.

🧩 Notes

• Area mining is authoritative on the server.
• Datapacks can exclude blocks through the justexcavators:excavator_no_aoe block tag.
• Smelting uses the currently loaded furnace recipes, including compatible datapack and modded recipes.
• Collector overflow is dropped at the original block position instead of being deleted.
• Administratively created invalid Core combinations safely disable enhancement effects for that break.

🏆 Credits

Created by Hyan Ferreira.

Inspired by the area-tool gameplay of JustHammers, while remaining a standalone and independently implemented mod.