Modular Golems

Build your golem piece by piece. 2,284,880 possible golems.

Modular Golems turns the iron golem into something you build yourself, block by block.

At its centre is the Golem Creator: a heavy runed forging table where you place a head, two torso blocks, one block per arm, and one block for the legs. The layout is shaped like a body — head on top, torso in the middle flanked by the two arms, legs below — and a live readout on the right recalculates health, damage, speed and abilities the instant a block lands in a slot.

Press Assemble and the parts fuse into a Golem Core. Use the core on a block and your golem comes to life with particles in its dominant material. Sneak and right-click your own golem and it folds back into a core, with nothing lost.

How many golems, exactly?

5 head tiers × 26 BASE materials × 4 body slots.

Stats that actually mean something

Iron is the anchor of the entire scale. An all-iron golem wearing a plain carved pumpkin is exactly a vanilla iron golem — x1.00 across the board. Everything else moves up or down from there based on what it costs you to get.

Health = 100   × torso.health   × head
Damage = 15    × average(arms)  × head
Speed  = 0.25  × legs.speed     × head

Those base values are the vanilla iron golem's. Speed is deliberately decorrelated from the other two, so obsidian trades mobility for bulk while gold and redstone do the exact opposite. And because the two arms average out, mixing one cheap arm into an expensive build costs you exactly half the difference.

HEAD — the multiplier

The head contributes no stat of its own. It multiplies everything the body already produced, which is why the jump between tiers is so steep. Craft each one by surrounding a Carved Pumpkin with 8 of the matching material.

The head tier also skins the golem's head: copper, iron, diamond or netherite plating. A plain carved pumpkin keeps the classic vanilla golem face.

BASE — the body

The torso takes two blocks of one material. Each arm and the legs take one. Only one multiplier is ever read per slot — the torso reads Health, the arms read Damage, the legs read Speed — but every material defines all three, so materials stay directly comparable no matter where you decide to put them.

Any vanilla log or stem works: oak, spruce, birch, jungle, acacia, dark oak, mangrove, cherry, crimson stem, warped stem and bamboo block. They share a stat profile, but each keeps its own texture on the golem.

16 themed abilities

Every ability is drawn from what that block actually does in vanilla. A golem inherits the ability of every distinct material it was built from, so a copper torso with diamond arms grants both — up to four at once.

• Iron Core (Iron) — iron ingots repair it for 25 health instead of 15.
• Conductive (Copper) — immune to lightning, and discharges into anyone who hits it in melee.
• Piglin Pact (Gold) — piglins lose interest in the golem and in its owner.
• Pristine Edge (Diamond) — takes 20% less damage from every source.
• Ancient Resilience (Netherite) — immune to fire and lava, and cannot be knocked back.
• Merchant's Guard (Emerald) — heals near villagers and sometimes drops emeralds on a kill.
• Resonance (Amethyst) — every hit splashes a third of its damage onto nearby enemies.
• Unbreakable (Obsidian) — immune to explosions and cannot be knocked back.
• Lament (Crying Obsidian) — survives one lethal blow per life, coming back at half health.
• Overclocked (Redstone) — bursts into Speed II every ten seconds.
• Enchanted (Lapis) — marks targets with Glowing and showers experience on a kill.
• Aquatic Guardian (Prismarine) — gains Conduit Power and 30% more damage while submerged.
• Calcite Echo (Calcite) — every hit releases a sonic pulse that throws nearby enemies back.
• Void-Born (End Stone) — ignores fall damage and blinks away when badly wounded.
• Malleable (Clay) — slowly reknits itself in water or rain.
• Natural Symbiosis (Logs) — regenerates on natural ground, but takes 50% more fire damage.

Real dynamic texturing

This is not a colour tint painted over one texture.

Shipping one texture per combination is combinatorially hopeless, so the mod bakes a fresh 128×128 skin at runtime the first time it sees a new combination. Each region of the golem's UV map is filled with that limb's actual block texture, modulated by the vanilla iron golem texture used as a luminance mask — and that is what keeps the plating seams, the cracks and the face, instead of leaving you a flat single-colour mannequin. If your arms are copper, your arms are copper.

Because the left and right arms are separate slots, a golem with a copper left arm and a gold right arm is mirrored against the reverse build — two visually different golems, and two separately baked skins.

Baked skins are cached and regenerated on resource reload, so resource packs work normally. And since everything ends up on a single sheet, the whole golem still draws in one pass: per-limb texturing costs nothing at render time.

Golems also emit ambient particles matched to their dominant material — electric sparks for copper, glints for diamond, magic motes for amethyst and obsidian — and they reuse the vanilla iron golem crack overlays, so damage stays readable on any material.

Your golem, your bodyguard

The golem remembers who made it. It will never attack its owner, it retaliates against anything that hurts them, and it piles onto whatever its owner is attacking.

The whole configuration is stored in NBT, so it keeps its exact stats across save and load — and across being picked back up and placed again.

Crafting the Golem Creator

[ Iron Block     ]  [ Anvil          ]  [ Iron Block     ]
[ Amethyst Shard ]  [ Smithing Table ]  [ Amethyst Shard ]
[ Iron Block     ]  [ Redstone Block ]  [ Iron Block     ]

Every ingredient is there for a reason: the anvil and smithing table forge the body, the amethyst shards inscribe the runes, the redstone block animates the construct, and the iron blocks are the golem stock itself. It needs an iron pickaxe to mine, and drops itself intact.

The range

Effective health caps at 1,024, which is vanilla's MAX_HEALTH attribute limit. That ceiling is intentional.

There is no single "best" golem. The speed ceiling does not come from netherite at all — redstone legs with a Supreme head hit 2.0 movement speed, eight times a vanilla golem's. From the weakest build to the strongest is a factor of ×23 in health and ×24 in damage.

Requires NeoForge for Minecraft 1.21.1. Fully playable in singleplayer and on servers. A