Courier Boot Upgrades

Upgrade the boots you already own — don't replace them.

Courier Boot Upgrades was designed with the MineColonies mod in mind (give your couriers and guards faster, tougher footwear!), but it has no dependencies whatsoever — it works perfectly in pure vanilla and in any modpack. Minecraft 1.20.1, Forge 47.x, required on client and server.

What it does

Craft any pair of boots together with an upgrade material and you get the same boots back with a permanent upgrade trait added. No new boot items, no custom textures, no replacement gear: your enchantments, durability damage, custom names, lore, armor trims, dye colors and any other mod's data stay exactly as they were. It works for players and for mobs wearing boots (zombies, skeletons, piglins, armor stands, compatible modded entities).

All boots are auto-imported at game start. The mod scans the item registry and automatically makes every boot item upgradeable — vanilla boots, modded boots, all of them, zero configuration. Datapacks can additionally tag unusual footwear with forge:boots.

Built-in upgrades (shapeless, any crafting grid)

Boots +	Trait	Default effect
Diamond	Courier	+10% movement speed
Diamond Block	Reinforced	2× maximum durability
Emerald	Shiny	+5% movement speed
Emerald Block	Shiny II	+10% movement speed
Netherite Ingot	Swift	+20% movement speed
Netherite Block	Super	+20% movement speed

Everything stacks — there are no tiers. Apply traits in any order; each one can be applied once. All five speed traits together = +65% movement speed at default settings. Durability traits multiply: Reinforced (2×) plus a custom 3× trait = 6× total durability — with the durability bar, breaking point, Mending and Unbreaking all respecting the new maximum.

Create your own upgrades in-game — no restart, no datapack

Operators (permission level 2) can invent new upgrade traits while the server is running, and they become craftable instantly:

/courierboots add Runner minecraft:sugar speed 8 → boots + sugar = +8% speed

/courierboots add "Heavy Plating" minecraft:iron_block armour 3

/courierboots add Durable minecraft:obsidian durability 3 → 3× durability

/courierboots add Hardened #forge:ingots/steel toughness 2

Materials can be a single item or any item tag (#forge:...). Conflicting or ambiguous materials are rejected up front, and re-checked on every datapack reload.

Tune everything live

Every value — including the built-in ones — can be changed at runtime and applies immediately to all existing boots and every loaded entity wearing them, no recrafting needed:

/courierboots courier speed 20 → Courier is now +20% speed

/courierboots reinforced 8 → Reinforced is now 8× durability

/courierboots Runner 12 → edits a custom trait by its own effect

/courierboots super false → disable a trait (marker stays, effect off)

/courierboots list → overview of every trait and its state

/courierboots reset all → back to defaults

Value ranges

Effect	Range	Meaning
speed	0 – 100	percent movement speed
armour	0 – 100	flat armor points
toughness	0 – 100	flat armor toughness
durability	1 – 10 per trait	durability multiplier
combined durability	capped at 1000×	safety limit across all stacked traits

Good to know

All settings and custom traits are saved per world and synchronized to clients automatically — the server is always authoritative, and boots only ever store trait IDs (no cheatable NBT values).
Tooltips list every trait on the boots, plus totals, in English and German.
Runtime-created recipes can't show up in the vanilla recipe book (they're created after datapacks load) — crafting itself works perfectly.
Designed alongside MineColonies for speedy couriers, but again: no dependencies, vanilla-friendly, drop it in any pack.

Install on both client and server.

MineColonies Courier Boots