🛰️ ORBITAL STRIKE

Paint the target. Call the satellite. Erase the map.

One designator. Six seconds of dread. A hole straight through the world. Then the fallout.

Fabric 26.1.2 · NeoForge 1.21.1 · Client & Server · Current version: 1.4.1

💡 Got an idea for the mod? A new weapon, a mutant, a feature, anything: write it in the comments! Every suggestion is read, and the best ones may make it into a future update.

🌌 What is Orbital Strike?

High above your world, a satellite is waiting for coordinates.

Orbital Strike adds the Orbital Strike Designator, a long-range targeting weapon that calls down a column of pure energy from orbit. The beam punches through the planet, from the build limit all the way down to the Void.

The strike is only the beginning. It leaves behind an irradiated wasteland: ash storms, a toxic haze, dead forests and a radiation zone that lasts for days. To survive, you'll need a Geiger counter, a hazmat suit, lead shelters and some medicine.

Every frame is built with custom GPU shaders: holographic HUD lattices, HDR beams, volumetric glow and real-time lens flares. No recoloured vanilla particles. Compatible with Iris / Sodium shader packs.

"You don't fire it. You request it."

⚡ Anatomy of a Strike

🎯 Phase I: Target Acquisition

Right-click any block up to 320 blocks away. The coordinates uplink, and the ground starts to glow.

• A holographic perimeter boots up around the target: neon rings, rotating arcs, tick marks and a dashed outer frame
• A radar sweep scans the area with a phosphor trail while sonar pulses ripple outward
• Six relay lasers descend from the sky and spiral inward, converging on ground zero
• The satellite itself arrives above the target, unfolds its solar wings and deploys its emitter
• The palette shifts from cold cyan to alarm red as impact approaches
• Anyone nearby sees a pulsing red vignette and a live countdown: ⚠ ORBITAL STRIKE INBOUND ⚠ · IMPACT T-3.2
• A low hum swells in volume and pitch until the final second

☄️ Phase II: The Lance

A colossal beam of energy slams down from the satellite.

• HDR, multi-layer beam: white-hot core, glowing sheath, deep-blue haze, animated plasma filaments and rotating helices
• Volumetric light scattering, so the beam lights the air around it from every angle
• Twin shockwave rings sweep across the landscape
• Incandescent debris rains along ballistic arcs
• A blinding white-out flash, then a screen-space lens flare with an anamorphic streak and lens ghosts, hidden when terrain blocks your view
• Camera shake that reaches you when the blast front does: the farther away you stand, the later and weaker it hits
• The terrain is actually lit up around the site, day or night
• Every entity in the beam is erased, End Crystals included

🕳️ Phase III: The Void Shaft

The lance does not leave a crater. It leaves a wound in the world.

• A massive cylindrical shaft (~44 blocks across) is bored through the entire world height, bedrock included, opening straight onto the Void
• The shaft's edge is shaped by fractal Perlin noise, so every strike is unique, jagged and molten
• The walls are fused rock streaked with veins of magma, sand turned to glass, and fire along the rim
• Water caught in the wall flash-freezes into cobblestone and lava solidifies into obsidian, sealing the shaft from nearby oceans and lava lakes
• The beam keeps firing until the shaft reaches the Void, then collapses

☢️ Phase IV: The Fallout

Once the beam goes out, the land around the shaft dies.

• The area turns into a new biome, the Irradiated Wasteland, with a grey sky, murky green water and withered vegetation
• Trees burn: logs become Charred Logs (one per wood type), leaves wither into Dead Leaves, vines and cocoa fall off
• Sugar cane, bamboo, melons and pumpkins die and rot in place, and grass turns to Ashen Grass (it can still be tilled, flattened into a path, and planted on)
• Crops caught in the fallout turn radioactive
• For 2 days, dark storm clouds cover the zone and radioactive ash snow falls, slowly piling up in ash layers (up to 3 deep near the shaft) that disappear after 5 days
• A toxic grey haze hangs over the zone for 5 days: visibility drops to about 25 blocks, and it's night in there, all the time.
• The monsters that spawn in the wasteland are radioactive mutants
• It never snows there: the rain falls green and radioactive, and standing in it doubles your dose
• The radiation zone lasts for 20 days, strongest at ground zero and fading toward the edges

🌍 Dimensions

• 🟩 Overworld: full strike, full fallout
• 🟥 Nether: "No satellite uplink in the Nether." The designator refuses to fire
• 🟪 The End: the satellite can't reach that far, so the beam comes out of a dimensional rift torn open 50 blocks above the target. The rift only destroys what lies beneath it. The End gets radiation, but no ash

☢️ Radiation & Survival

Radiation builds up as a dose while you stay in the zone, and the dose climbs 4× faster if you swim in irradiated water. Past a certain dose, it starts hurting you, and it can kill you. Monsters and animals are affected too.

Leaving the zone lets the dose drop slowly, and it drops 3× faster in clean water.

The RAD HUD shows radiation icons that appear one by one as your dose increases.

☄️ Meteorites

About once every 6 Minecraft days, a meteorite falls from the sky near a player, with a fiery trail and a deafening roar.

• It digs an organic crater and brings the full fallout with it: irradiated biome, dead trees and radiation
• At the bottom lies Meteorite Debris, which drops Meteorite Fragments
• A single meteorite gives enough fragments for one designator, never two, so every weapon is a trophy
• Operators can call one down with /orbitalstrike meteor

🧟 Mutant Monsters

Radiation doesn't only kill. What it kills gets back up.

A zombie, zombie villager, skeleton, creeper, spider or enderman that dies of radiation rises again as its radioactive mutant, and the monsters that spawn in the Irradiated Wasteland are mutants from the start: a twisted 3D model covered in tumours, bone and glowing green crystals, with a deeper voice. Mutants have a third more health than their vanilla monster, are immune to radiation, don't burn in daylight, keep the equipment of the monster they used to be, and many of their attacks inflict ☣️ Contamination: while it lasts, your radiation dose keeps rising.

Their crystals glow in the dark (with or without shaders), so you'll see them coming… if you're lucky. Every mutant has its own spawn egg in the creative tab.

🌾 Mutant Crops

Wheat, carrots, potatoes and beetroots planted in the Irradiated Wasteland or next to irradiated water grow into mutant crops, with their own twisted textures. They produce Mutant Wheat, Carrots, Potatoes and Beetroots, plus Mutant Bread. They're edible, but slightly radioactive.

• Mutant carrots, potatoes and beetroots can be replanted anywhere, on any farmland, and grow mutant crops
• Mutant crops need no light: they grow in the dark and under the haze
• Melons and pumpkins grown in the wasteland come out rotten

♻️ Salvaging the Wasteland

Nothing goes to waste after the blast:

• Charred Logs → charcoal and ashes
• Dead Sugar Cane → paper, fuel, compost
• Dead Bamboo → sticks, scaffolding, fuel, compost
• Rotten Melons & Pumpkins → bone meal, seeds to replant, compost, and pumpkins make Jack o'Lanterns
• Dead Leaves → compost and decoration
• Ashes → lye → potassium hydroxide → iodine tablets and activated charcoal

🔧 Crafting

🛰️ The Designator

The designator is assembled from five precision components, and each one needs a Meteorite Fragment.

Final assembly (crafting table):

        [ Scope ]
[ Stock ] [ Body ] [ Barrel ]
       [ Magazine ]

Total cost: 5 Meteorite Fragments · 2 Diamonds · 6 Obsidian · 4 Redstone Blocks · 3 Gold Ingots · 16 Iron Ingots · 4 Blaze Powder · 2 Ender Pearls · 1 Netherite Ingot.

The satellite uplink survives 5 strikes, and needs 15 seconds to recharge between shots. In creative mode, there is no recharge and no wear.

🦺 Hazmat Suit

Lead is a new ore, about as rare as gold. Smelt it into Lead Ingots.

🧪 Medicine & Tools

🎮 Gameplay Features

• 🔥 Weapon feel: firing kicks the designator back with recoil, then it lowers and vibrates while it vents heat, and its texture glows red-hot until the satellite recharges
• 💀 Lethal blast zone: damage scales with distance, throws entities back and sets them on fire. Anything standing in the beam is incinerated. Custom death messages included
• 🔊 Layered sound design: lock-on chime, accelerating targeting beeps, alarm, charge-up, beam ignition, a triple-layered impact, Geiger clicks and the roar of falling meteorites
• 🤲 First-person polish: two-handed grip on the designator, a hand holding the Geiger counter and hazmat sleeves on your arms
• 📦 Dedicated creative tab with every item and block of the mod
• 🌍 English & French translations

🚀 Built for Performance

Erasing 200,000+ blocks in one shot would normally freeze a server. Orbital Strike doesn't.

• ⏱️ The shaft is drilled layer by layer over several ticks under a strict time budget per tick, and the fallout (dead trees, biome change) is spread out the same way
• 📊 Measured in-game: ~230,000 blocks in ~4 seconds, with typical tick spikes around 10 ms
• 🧵 Multiple strikes queue up instead of stacking their cost
• 💾 If the server shuts down mid-strike, the shaft is completed before saving, so no half-bored world is saved
• ✅ Every release is verified in-game with automated client tests, with and without shaders

📋 Requirements

⚠️ Fair Warning

A single strike permanently destroys a huge area and opens a hole into the Void. Players and mobs that fall in will not come back, and the land around it stays radioactive for days. On multiplayer servers, think twice before handing out designators. On the other hand, it makes a great closing act for a server event.

❓ FAQ

Can I use it in a modpack? Yes, feel free to include it in any modpack.

Forge / NeoForge version? Yes: a NeoForge 1.21.1 version is available with the same content (the Pale Garden does not exist in 1.21.1, so there is no pale oak variant). There is no Forge version.

Does it work with shader packs? Yes. The mod ships its own shaders and works without any shader pack, and it's also tested with Iris + Sodium on both Fabric and NeoForge (Sildur's Vibrant Shaders). The strike effects and the haze are drawn on top of the pack, and the mod's plants wave in the wind like vanilla ones.

How do I get a designator? Wait for a meteorite to fall, or find one's crater, and mine the debris at its centre. Then gather the rest of the materials and craft the five components.

🆕 What's new in 1.4.2

• 🌫️ A dome of grey fog hides the radioactive zones from outside
• 🌑 A real night under the haze, with or without shaders
• 🌧️ Green radioactive rain that doubles your dose, and no more snow in the wasteland
• 🧟 Mutants have a third more health; the radioactive zombie gets faster in its second stage; the baby is faster and pounces on running players
• 🛠️ Fixes: creeper dust stays on the ground, no more blocks thrown onto trees nor floating trees after a creeper blast, the baby zombie's arms stay attached

1.4.1

• 🌾 Radioactive crops, the full cycle: crops planted in the wasteland come up radioactive, crops caught in the fallout mutate, mutant produce can be replanted anywhere, and mutant crops grow without light. Melons and pumpkins grown in the wasteland are rotten
• 🌑 Permanent night under the grey haze
• 🧟 Mutants spawn in the wasteland, survive the day, and each one got a new ability (meltdown rage, leaping babies, dense bones, web shot, water-proof enderman…)
• 💥 The radioactive creeper now digs a small meteorite-like crater and leaves a hot spot of extreme radiation
• 🌱 Ashen grass behaves like grass (hoe, shovel, plants)
• 🛠️ Fixes: ash layers now pile up, no more grass floating after a strike; on NeoForge, transparent blocks (lead door, dead leaves, crops…) and the hand under the barrel are fixed

1.4.0

• 🧟 Radioactive mutants: zombies (and their babies), zombie villagers, skeletons, creepers, spiders and endermen killed by radiation rise again as mutants, each with its own 3D model and special abilities
• ☣️ New Contamination effect inflicted by the mutants
• 🥚 Spawn eggs for every mutant
• 🟧 New: NeoForge 1.21.1 version, with all the same features

Full changelog in the Files tab.