Vindicator's Slash Blade

Give your mobs a real SlashBlade. Vindicator's Slash Blade teaches hostile mobs to actually fight with SlashBlade: Resharped — full combo chains, slash arts, aerial juggles, step tricks and, at the top level, summoned swords — while keeping them from slaughtering their own allies.

In vanilla SlashBlade, only the player can use a blade. Mobs can hold one (via datapack or commands), but they just swing it like a stick: no combos, no arts, no animations. This mod fills that gap. It hooks the SlashBlade combat system into mob AI, so an illager with a katana becomes an actual duelling opponent instead of a reskinned zombie.

---

Features

Any mob can be a blader

A config whitelist decides which entity types fight with a blade, and at what level:

Effect on gameplay: you are not locked into one enemy type. You can turn a single vindicator into a mini-boss, make an entire pillager raid blade-wielding, or add mobs from other mods — no datapack or code required. Any entity that has a main hand and a pathfinder AI can be enrolled. Out of the box the list contains one entry, minecraft:vindicator, 6 — the mod's namesake, at full strength.

Six blader levels

Every whitelist entry takes a level from 1 to 6. The level decides which techniques the mob is allowed to use and how fast it attacks:

Level	Attack cooldown	Rapid Slash	Upper Slash Jump	Powerful	Slash Arts	Void Slash	Air Trick / Trick Down / Trick Dodge	Just Slash Arts	Mirage Blade
1	5 ticks	–	–	–	–	–	–	–	–
2	4 ticks	–	–	✔	–	–	–	–	–
3	3 ticks	✔	✔	✔	–	–	–	–	–
4	2 ticks	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	–	–
5	2 ticks	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	–
6	2 ticks	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔

Powerful makes the mob interrupt its own combo more easily and shortens its Just Slash cooldown, so it feels relentless rather than scripted. The attack cooldown bottoms out at 2 ticks per swing from level 4 upward — above that point, levels are separated by what the blader can do, not by how fast it swings.

Effect on gameplay: difficulty is now a dial instead of a switch. A level 1 blader is a novelty; a level 3 blader already opens with a dash slash and a rising attack; a level 5 blader chains aerial combos and blinks out of your reach; a level 6 blader adds a halo of summoned blades on top. You can put the same mob type at different levels in different structures by editing one line.

Mirage blade (level 6)

Level 6 bladers unlock the summoned-sword system: a set of blades that orbit the mob and strike out at whatever it is fighting, giving it ranged pressure that runs in parallel with its melee combos. Summoned swords respect friendly-fire protection too — they never deal damage to the blader's own allies.

Effect on gameplay: the top tier stops being "the same fight, faster". You now have to deal with a threat that keeps attacking while it closes distance, and the visual silhouette of an orbiting blade ring tells you immediately that this one is not a level 3.

Born with a blade

Mobs on the bornWithBladeWhitelist spawn already holding a random blade — picked from every SlashBlade registered in your pack, so modded and datapack blades are included automatically.

Effect on gameplay: no more setting up commands or loot tables to arm your enemies. Because the blade is rolled from the registry, the same mob can show up with a different weapon each time, which keeps encounters varied. Drop chance defaults to 0, so bladers never hand out free endgame katanas — you can raise it if you want them to be a loot source.

Friendly-fire protection

Area-of-effect slash attacks no longer shred the attacker's own side:

• a blader never damages itself;

• a blader never damages entities it is allied to (same team, same raid);

• a blader never damages players unless it is a hostile mob or is already targeting a player;

• summoned swords (level 6) honour the same rules and never damage allies.

Effect on gameplay: this is the feature that makes the mod playable rather than chaotic. Pillager raids keep their internal cohesion, villagers and iron golems can be given blades without wiping out the village they defend, and a patrolling ally will not clip you with a sweeping slash while you fight next to it.

Blade reach instead of vanilla melee range

Melee range checks for blade-holding mobs use SlashBlade's own resolved reach instead of the vanilla 3-block box.

Effect on gameplay: what you see is what hits you. The mob starts its combo at the distance its animation suggests, so fights stop feeling like the enemy is swinging at air from two blocks away.

Full combat animations on vanilla models

Blade combat animations are written straight onto vanilla model parts — the pose data comes from SlashBlade's VMD animations, resolved through playerAnimator's transform API — with dedicated support for:

• humanoid models (zombies, husks, drowned, zombie villagers, skeletons, strays, wither skeletons, piglins, piglin brutes, players-shaped mobs),

• illager models (vindicators, pillagers, evokers, illusioners),

• villager models.

Body rotation is applied to the render pass on top of the model pose, so spins and turns read correctly instead of the mob sliding around while facing forward. Models outside these three families are deliberately skipped — a modded mob with a custom skeleton never gets bent into impossible poses, it simply falls back to vanilla animation.

Effect on gameplay: you can tell at a glance what a blader is doing — wind-up, combo step, aerial slash — instead of guessing from a static pose. It is the difference between "a mob with a sword texture" and "a mob that fights". The whole layer can be switched off with usePlayerAnimator for low-end machines; combat logic is unaffected.

Mobs don't wear out blades

Blade durability is skipped when a non-player entity lands a hit.

Effect on gameplay: blades held by mobs last as long as the mob does. Nothing silently downgrades mid-fight, and a blader you equipped by hand will not break its weapon after twenty hits.

Step-trick effects

The whole trick system — air trick, trick down, trick dodge — unlocks at level 4, and bladers trail ender particles when they use it. Both live behind the showEnderParticles switch, which defaults to on; turn it off to disable step tricks entirely and keep fights grounded.

Effect on gameplay: mobility abilities become readable. You can see a blader blink out and reposition instead of it looking like a teleporting bug — and if you would rather not deal with teleporting enemies at all, one config line removes them.

---

Configuration

All options live in config/vindicators_slash_blade-common.toml and are server-side — change them without touching the client.

Option	Type	Default	What it does
bladerWhitelist	list of "entity_id, level"	["minecraft:vindicator, 6"]	Which mobs fight with a blade, and at which level (1–6)
bornWithBladeWhitelist	list of entity_id	["minecraft:vindicator"]	Which mobs spawn already holding a random blade
bornWithBladeChance	0.0 – 1.0	1.0	Chance that a born-with-blade mob actually gets one
bladeDropChance	0.0 – 1.0	0.0	Chance a blader drops its blade on death
showEnderParticles	boolean	true	Step tricks and their particle trail
usePlayerAnimator	boolean	true	Apply blade animations to model parts (disable for low-end machines)

---

Requirements

Mod	Version
Minecraft	1.21.1
NeoForge	21.1.228 or newer
SlashBlade: Resharped	2.1.9-1.21.1 or newer
SBR Core	1.5.2-hotfix1 or newer
playerAnimator	2.0.4+1.21.1 or newer

Install on both client and server. The AI and damage logic run on the server; the animation and model mixins run on the client. A client-only install will work but you will lose all blade animations, and a server-only install will leave you fighting invisible combo steps.

---

Notes

• This mod adds no items, no blocks and no worldgen. It is pure behaviour, so it is safe to add to an existing world.

• Blades are picked from the SlashBlade registry at spawn time. If your pack has zero registered blades, born-with-blade mobs simply spawn empty-handed instead of crashing.

• Mobs are allowed to chain any combo sequence; there is no per-level combo whitelist yet.

• Animations are limited to the three vanilla model families listed above. Mobs from other mods that reuse those models get the full animation for free; mobs with custom renderers stay on vanilla animation.

• Removing the mod leaves already-equipped mobs holding ordinary SlashBlades — they will still swing them, just without combos.

---

Credits

• SlashBlade: Resharped — flammpfeil and contributors, for the combat system this mod drives.

• SBR Core — mrqx, for SimpleSlashGoal, the mob-side attack utilities and the animation converter.

• playerAnimator — KosmX, for the transform API the pose data is applied through.

Licensed under MIT. Issues and suggestions are welcome on the issue tracker.