True Sword Damage
Your weapon tooltip is lying to you. This mod fixes that.
Minecraft's weapon tooltip shows one static number that is almost never the damage you actually deal. In vanilla it's already misleading — attack cooldown scales damage, and Smite V adds 12.5 against undead without the number ever moving. In a modded pack it's outright wrong: mods add damage in ways the tooltip can't see, and you end up with a Draconic Evolution sword whose tooltip never changes when you install upgrades, or an Avaritia Sword of the Cosmos showing "2 Attack Damage" while it one-shots a Wither.
True Sword Damage replaces that single dishonest number with a damage profile — a small set of rows derived from what the weapon actually does, measured, not guessed.
- A plain iron sword stays a single clean line.
- Smite V shows two rows.
- A fully upgraded modded weapon shows exactly what it does — with zero mod-specific code anywhere in this project.
The tooltip gets as complicated as the weapon is, and never more.
Why the number in vanilla is wrong
Mods add damage in three ways, and only the first one reaches the tooltip:
- Attribute modifiers on the item — shown correctly.
- Intercepting the damage event or overriding the hit code — invisible to the tooltip.
- Bypassing the damage pipeline entirely (custom damage source, direct health edits) — invisible, and the vanilla number is meaningless.
Modded weapon damage is not a property of the weapon. It's a function of the weapon and the target. A single static number is structurally incapable of expressing that — so this mod stops trying to fix the number, and replaces it with something that can actually tell the truth.
How it measures
Three layered tiers, each a fallback and cross-check for the one above:
- Tier 1 — Analytic. Always on, zero side effects. Reads attribute modifiers, target-aware bonuses, enchantments and armor reduction directly. Correct for vanilla, but blind to anything a mod hides from the tooltip.
- Tier 2 — Sandbox strike. Instantiates real reference mobs (zombie, spider, creeper, cow, and an armored target) completely detached from the world, and actually strikes them with a disposable copy of your weapon. This is where hidden damage becomes visible.
- Tier 3 — Empirical correction. Quietly watches real combat. If a weapon behaves differently in an actual fight than the sandbox predicted, real combat wins and the tooltip says so.
Profiles are computed once, cached, and pushed to your client — no lag, no placeholder text, no spinner. Until a profile arrives the vanilla tooltip is left exactly as it was.
What you'll actually see
| Situation | Tooltip shows |
|---|---|
| Ordinary vanilla weapon | Normal single damage line, untouched |
| Smite V axe | Damage: 8 and vs Undead: 20.5 |
| Modded sword with hidden on-hit bonus | The real number the vanilla tooltip was hiding |
| A weapon that ignores armor entirely | Ignores armour label instead of a misleading figure |
| A weapon that deals absurd, uncappable damage | Instant kill instead of a meaningless number |
Honest by design
This mod never changes damage — it only reads and reports, with zero gameplay effect. And it's honest about its own limits, too: a weapon that fully bypasses the damage pipeline can only be labelled, not measured, and no simulation can suppress every side effect another mod's on-hit code might cause. Where it can't know for certain, it says so instead of guessing.
Configuration
Fully configurable via a plain JSON file — tune the sensitivity of when a weapon "earns" an extra row, disable the sandbox simulation entirely, blacklist specific mods from it, or turn off empirical tracking. Sensible defaults work out of the box; nothing needs to be touched to get correct tooltips.
Compatibility
- Minecraft 1.21.1
- NeoForge and Fabric
- No per-mod compatibility code — works against any weapon mod out of the box, because the profile is derived from measurement rather than authored per mod.
- Licensed under MIT.
Tested extensively against Avaritia, Draconic Evolution, EnderIO, and Iron's Spells 'n Spellbooks — including the exact case this mod exists for: a sword whose tooltip says 2 damage and whose sandbox measurement is effectively infinite.
The True Sword Damage Team
Owner
