RocketBall

⚡ Rocket Ball

A deadly game of hot potato with homing energy balls, and a complete team sport built on top of it.

Throw a Rocket Ball and it starts hunting the nearest player like a guided missile. Hit it with a left click to send it flying back toward your rivals. Every hit charges it up: faster, brighter, harder-hitting. Miss it and you take the blast.

Then build an arena, place two goals and turn it into a 10-minute team match: first to 10 goals wins.

🎮 Free-for-all

- Throw it. Right click to launch the ball. It locks onto the closest player.
- Smack it. Left click the ball to send it in the direction you are looking. It never flies straight: it curves toward its target on wide, rounded arcs.
- Charge it. Each hit adds energy. The ball speeds up and its color shifts from cyan to gold to red-hot. Damage scales with speed.
- Dodge it. The ball never phases through blocks. It bounces off walls, floors and ceilings with low, moon-like gravity, and every bounce leaves an animated mark on the surface.
- Get hit, lose the round. The ball explodes, launches the victim, blasts every nearby player away with a shockwave, shakes everyone's screen, then returns to the inventory of the last player who hit it.
- Overcharge. Past 16 hits the ball doubles in size, crackles with lightning and detonates in a massive explosion.

🏟️ Team mode

- Two teams, red and blue, a 60-second lobby, at least 2 players.
- 10 minutes of play, first team to 10 goals. Keep inventory is on, players respawn at their team spawn, Speed II for everyone.
- In a match the ball ignores players and flies toward the enemy goal of the last player who touched it. Steal it with one hit and it turns around.
- Score, timer, possession, kickoff and events are shown on an animated HUD with goal banners, screen flashes and confetti.
- After a goal everyone is teleported back to their spawn and the team that conceded gets the first touch.
- Random ball mode switches to a different ball at every kickoff. Anarchy mode adds balls with the team size: 2v2 one ball, 3v3 two, 5v5 three.

🔮 Six balls, six playstyles

- Rocket Ball – the original: nested energy squares, cyan to red.
- Meteor Ball – a lava-cracked rock that grows with every hit. Near its target it spirals upward, locks a red target square on the ground, then dives and craters the arena.
- Tempest Ball – a storm core crackling with lightning. Flies erratically, and on impact calls a lightning strike from the sky with chain arcs to everyone nearby.
- Void Ball – a black hole with a violet aura that blinks toward you. Its explosion is an implosion: it drags players in, then blasts them out.
- Frost Ball – an ice crystal with orbiting spikes. Freezes and slows whoever it hits, shatters into a dome of ice.
- Phoenix Ball – a golden sun with flapping flame wings that corkscrews through the air and explodes into a giant fire bird.

All five upgrades are crafted around a Rocket Ball with themed ingredients (magma cream, lightning rods, ender eyes, blue ice, blaze rods). The base ball is slime, glowstone and an ender pearl.

🛠️ Setting up an arena

Everything is done with two blocks and one command. Operator permission is required for the setup commands.

1. Build the goals. Take Red Team Blocks and Blue Team Blocks from the creative menu (Combat or Building Blocks tab). Build a closed rectangle of one color with nothing but air inside: any size from a 3x3 frame up to 40x40, on the floor, on a wall or on the ceiling. The moment the frame closes, a message confirms the goal and a colored force field appears inside it. Breaking any block of the frame removes the goal. Each team needs at least one goal; you can build several.

2. Set the spawns. Stand where you want each point, look in the direction players should face, and run:

/rocketball setspawn red
/rocketball setspawn blue
/rocketball setspawn lobby

3. Set the ball spawn. Stand at the center of the arena and run /rocketball setball. The ball appears one block above that point at every kickoff.

4. Pick the rules (optional).

/rocketball ballvariant meteor     ball type: classic, meteor, tempest, void, frost, phoenix
/rocketball ballvariant random     a different ball at every kickoff
/rocketball anarchie               several balls at once, scaled with team size
/rocketball speed 2                speed effect during the match (0 to disable)

5. Play. Run /rocketball start. Everyone online is teleported to the lobby and split into teams; players can switch with /rocketball join red or /rocketball join blue while the teams stay balanced. The match starts after 60 seconds with at least 2 players. Use /rocketball status, /rocketball goals and /rocketball stop to manage it.

The whole setup is saved with the world, so you only do it once per arena.

✨ Visuals that hit as hard as the ball

- Textureless, additive energy cores made of nested spinning squares, wire cubes, crystals and flames. Not a single vanilla particle: every spark, shard, flame, smoke puff and snowflake is custom.
- Fracture effect on every strike, dense particle trails that thicken with energy, light ribbons behind the ball.
- Six different multi-stage explosions: crater and lava fountains, thunderstorm with repeated strikes, implosion into a singularity, dome of ice spikes, giant phoenix spreading its wings.
- Animated surface marks on every bounce, oriented to the floor, wall or ceiling that was hit, wider the harder the impact.
- Camera shake and knockback that grow with the energy of the ball.