Trowel & Error

Trowel & Error
An unofficial, from-scratch spiritual successor to Torojima's wonderful but abandoned Buildhelper wands (Torojima's Buildhelper)— rebuilt for Minecraft 1.21.11 (Forge), and reimagined as a belt of mason's trowels.
If you ever begged for a Buildhelper update in a forum thread, this is the mod those threads were waiting for. Every wand you loved has been lovingly recreated as a trowel with its own colored handle, so you always know which tool is in your hand — plus a few quality-of-life features the original never had.
This mod is an unofficial continuation. All credit for the original concepts goes to Torojima, whose Buildhelper mod inspired every tool here. It was written entirely from scratch and is not affiliated with the original.
The Tool Belt
Fill Down Trowel — Right-click any block face and a support column sprouts one block out and fills straight down until it meets the ground. Click the side of a castle wall for an instant buttress; click a cliff edge to bridge a ravine. The classic "peer" wand, exactly as you remember it.
Cube Digger Trowel — An improved take on the Cube Digger wand. The digging mask orients itself to the face you click: the shape's cross-section lies flat against the wall or ground, and the depth tunnels inward.
Shapes: Square 3×3, Circle 5×5, Diamond 7×7
Depth: 1–6, selectable in the options screen
Spare Ores toggle: when enabled, ore blocks (vanilla #minecraft:ores and the common #c:ores tag, so modded ores count too) are left untouched for you to mine properly with Fortune or Silk Touch. Everything else breaks with normal drops — survival-safe by design.
Copy Paste Trowel — Copy a build, then paste it with rotation — while a live, color-coded wireframe preview shows exactly where (and how rotated) your paste will land before you commit.
Exchange Trowel — Swap one block type for another across an area, the tedious-retexturing killer.
Universal Fill Trowel — The all-purpose filler: smear the block you click into the space you need it.
Air Trowel — A portable eraser for mistakes and quick clears.
Controls & UI
Press G (rebindable in Controls) to open the Cube Digger options screen — pick a shape, cycle the depth, and toggle ore sparing. The world keeps running while it's open.
While holding the Cube Digger, a small corner readout shows your current mode (e.g. Digger: DIAMOND 7x7 d3 [ores]), so you never accidentally chew a 7-wide tunnel through a mountain. (Ask me if you want that one reworded — it's the voice of experience.)
Settings are stored per trowel using modern data components — two diggers can carry two different configurations.
For Survival Players
This isn't a creative-only cheat tool unless you want it to be. Blocks broken by the digger drop their normal loot, and the Spare Ores option leaves valuable seams in place for proper pickaxe work. Builders get instant architecture; miners keep their diamond economy.
Requirements & Compatibility
Minecraft 1.21.11 with Forge (61.x)
Client + server friendly (logic runs server-side; the preview and HUD are client-side)
Credits
Torojima — for the original Buildhelper, the mod this project continues. If you're out there: thank you.
Built with love, spite, and an unreasonable tolerance for API refactors by Emmery Chrisco.
Found a bug or have a trowel idea? Post it in the comments — the changelog so far has survived one rendering overhaul, two event-bus migrations, and a blur-related crash, so nothing scares this codebase anymore.