The first player to reach a dungeon chest empties it and everyone behind them finds a box of air. That turns exploring together into a race, and a race nobody agreed to enter.
Here, opening a loot chest opens your copy of it. The block itself is never unpacked: its loot table stays on it, unrolled, forever. What you take comes out of a copy made the first time you opened it, so the next player still gets a first look, and so does the one after that.
Everything else is vanilla. The chest is the same block, in the same place, with the same lid animation and the same sound. You walk up and open it.
The One New Thing To Look At
An unopened loot chest looks exactly like any other chest, because as far as you need to care it is one.
What vanilla can no longer tell you, once loot is per player, is that you have nothing left in this one. So a chest you have emptied wears a darkened clasp. Nothing hovers, nothing glows; the clasp just reads as spent from across a room.
That mark is drawn by Pandorical. A client without it sees ordinary chests everywhere and loses nothing but the reminder.
What Counts As A Loot Chest
A chest or barrel that still carries an unrolled loot table, which is how the game ships every naturally generated one.
A chest minecart too. The one in a mineshaft is the same promise in a different shape, and arriving second at one is the same disappointment. A cart is an entity rather than a block, its table hangs off the vehicle, and vanilla unpacks it on the first look - so it takes its own handling, but from the outside it behaves exactly like the chest in the ground.
A chest you have been keeping wheat in is not a loot chest and never becomes one. Neither is a double chest with a table on only one half, which is a shape this mod does not claim to understand: both fall through to vanilla, untouched. Refusing the cases it is unsure of is the whole safety story, because the worst thing it could do is stand between you and an ordinary chest.
Details Worth Knowing
- Your roll is stable. It is seeded from the chest's own seed, your UUID, and the position. Reopening a chest you have not taken from shows the same contents.
- Two players get different loot. Same chest, different rolls, because identical chests read as fake.
- You can take, not put. A copy that accepted items would be a private chest at every dungeon in the world, and a promise to remember an inventory per player per chest forever. Taking is all these are for.
- Half-emptied chests persist. Leave three things behind, come back next week, they are still there. Yours.
- Emptied ones stop being inventories. Once a copy runs out it is thrown away and only the position is kept, because the one question left about it has the answer no. Since copies only ever shrink, that is where nearly all of them end up: one number instead of 27 slots.
- Double chests behave. Two copies joined into one 54-slot menu, in the same order vanilla uses, so it does not matter which half you clicked.
- Breaking the chest ends it. Every player's copy of that position is dropped, so nothing outlives the block or attaches itself to whatever is built there next.
- You cannot walk away and keep looting. The copy closes at the same range a real chest would.
A known edge
A comparator or hopper reading an unopened loot chest makes vanilla unpack it on the spot, which is vanilla's behaviour and predates this mod. If that happens the chest becomes an ordinary one holding a single rolled batch, shared, exactly as it would without this installed. It needs someone to have deliberately placed the comparator, so it has not come up.
Chest Utils
Where Chest Utils is installed, your copy opens on its screen instead of the plain one, and picks up the two buttons that make sense for something you can only take from: take the lot, and top off the part-used stacks you are already carrying.
Neither mod knows how the other builds a screen. Chest Utils exposes a take-only screen for any container; this mod hands over a copy and gets the buttons for free. Without it, copies open on the ordinary chest screen and nothing else changes.
Pandorical
Loot Ender runs server-side, and Pandorical is a hard dependency (fabric.mod.json): the server will not load this mod without it. It is used for one thing, the darkened clasp on a chest you have emptied, drawn through Pandorical's chest overlay API.
No Loot Ender jar is needed on a client.
The Loot Ender Team
