Create/Mekanism Modular

A Truly Modular addon for Minecraft 1.21.1 / NeoForge. It adds 124 materials drawn from 20 mods - Create, Mekanism, Ice and Fire, Immersive Engineering, Ender IO, Applied Energistics, Occultism, Ars Nouveau, Iron's Spells, Pastel, Crystal Chronicles, NauTec, Superb Warfare, Industrial Foregoing, RFTools, Create Deco, Steampunk Dimension and the three Create aerospace addons - so their metals, gems, scales and essences can all be used to build modular tools and armour.

Every source mod is optional. Install any subset - the materials for mods you do not have are never registered.

How it is put together

Almost all of this mod is data: MIAPI material JSON under src/main/resources/packs/<mod>/data/cmmodular/miapi/materials/.

The small amount of Java exists for two reasons.

Conditional loading. MIAPI reads materials with its own loader, which does not honour neoforge:conditions or anything else that could switch a file off, and a material whose ingredient item is missing fails to parse. So each source mod's materials are a separate built-in datapack, registered in CMModular.java only when that mod is present.

Identical materials are one material. Several metals and gems come from more than one mod - silver from Ice and Fire, Immersive Engineering, Occultism and Superb Warfare, steel from Mekanism, Immersive Engineering and Superb Warfare, and so on. There is one entry per metal, and every provider's version feeds it: alongside the primary provider's own items each material also accepts the c: common tag that all of them register into. Any mod's silver ingot is just silver.

Nothing records where a stack came from, because there is nothing to record - MIAPI stores only the material id on the item, so a tool built from Immersive Engineering silver is indistinguishable from one built with Ice and Fire silver. The primary provider's item is listed first, so anywhere a single representative item is read back out - repair and deconstruct previews - it resolves to the default rather than to whichever variant was used. Primaries are Mekanism for steel/lead/uranium, Ice and Fire for silver, Cosmonautics for titanium; each is a one-line change in tools/materials.py.

The material still lives in its primary provider's pack, so its icon and its first ingredient always point at an item that exists. Create: The Air War is the one provider that ships no common tags, so data/c/ adds its titanium to c:ingots/titanium with optional entries.

Fire immunity. Cinder essence grants immunity to fire, which is not an attribute the game has and not a property MIAPI offers. Instead of coupling to MIAPI's internals, FireImmunity.java registers a cmmodular:fire_immunity attribute, the material grants it like any other attribute, and a damage handler watches for it. Neither side knows about the other.

Stats

Tinkers' Construct 3 is the reference, re-scaled onto MIAPI's vanilla-derived numbers (iron 235 durability, diamond 1546, netherite 2016). Materials with no Tinkers counterpart are built from what the material actually is, then fitted to the nearest tier band:

Tinkers	here	shape
cobalt	titanium	light, fast, durable, unremarkable damage
steel	steel	balanced workhorse, poor enchantability
hepatizon	brass, bronze	copper alloys - quick and enchantable, not durable
manyullyn	dragonsteel	top damage, endgame gate
rose gold	refined glowstone, pixie dust	fragile, huge enchantability
ancient hide	dragon scales, chitin	armour-first, high toughness

Tiers 6 and 7 sit above netherite: 6 is refined obsidian, shadow steel, refined radiance, atomic alloy and the two Iron's Spells essences; 7 is the three dragonsteels and antimatter.

Real-material character does the rest of the work - lead is the heaviest thing here and swings slowest, osmium is dense and tough, HDPE weighs nothing and cannot cut rock, silver smites the undead.

All of it lives in tools/materials.py, one entry per material with the reasoning in comments next to the numbers.

Palettes

Colours are not hand-picked. tools/generate_materials.py opens the source mods' jars, resolves each material's item model to its texture, and samples that texture to build MIAPI's seven-stop grayscale_map.

The sampling deliberately does not normalise a stop's colour to its brightness number. A stop key is the brightness of MIAPI's grayscale template; its value is whatever the material looks like at that point in its own shading, which is why MIAPI's own netherite tops out at a murky 847a84 while iron runs to white. Samples are taken at percentiles of the texture's brightness order, so a texture with four shades still yields a full ramp and any hue drift between shadow and highlight survives. Pure-black outline pixels are excluded - they are not a shade of the material - and the darkest stop is extrapolated below the texture, which is what MIAPI's own palettes do.

The sample points were tuned against MIAPI's hand-authored copper palette and reproduce it to within about 2% per channel.

Building

./gradlew build

Needs nothing but NeoForge - Truly Modular is a runtime dependency only, since this mod talks to it purely through datapack JSON.

Regenerating materials

Only needed after editing tools/materials.py or when a source mod changes its textures. The generated JSON is committed, so a plain build does not need this.

python3 tools/generate_materials.py --jars ~/path/to/mod/jars

The folder needs one jar per source mod. Every item id in materials.py is checked against those jars and the run fails on a typo, rather than shipping a material that silently refuses to load.

Requires pillow and numpy.

Notes

• Titanium's palette comes from Cosmonautics' ingot, which is violet. Air War's is blue-white; swap palette_from on the titanium entry to prefer it.
• Cinder essence is nearly black, because its texture is a charred ember. It is emissive, so it still reads as fire in game.
• Dragon scales are one material per colour (12 dragon, 7 sea serpent, 3 death worm chitin). Colours within an element share stats and differ only in palette.
• Interstellar Expansion is mostly machinery. Only three of its items are a material rather than a component; solid E-710 is left out because it is rocket fuel.
• Gem sockets do not check the gem group. Arsenal gates melee gems on gem_melee and Armory gates armour gems on gem_armor, so every gem-like material carries both and fits any gem slot.
• Immersive Engineering contributes aluminium, nickel, constantan, electrum and graphite. Its steel, lead, uranium and silver are not separate materials - see overlapping metals above. Superb Warfare's steel/lead/silver and Create Crafts & Additions' electrum are skipped for the same reason.
• Crystal Chronicles and Pastel add whole families of gems that differ by colour and lore rather than by kind, so those are generated from a table with shared stat bands per tier. What actually tells them apart in game is the palette, and that still comes from each gem's own texture.
• Arcane essence gives max mana per slot: 1300 on a helmet, 900 chest, 800 legs, 700 boots, 900 held in the main hand, 400 offhand. Separate per-slot modifiers rather than one armor-wide one, so a weapon reads as a held bonus instead of claiming something "when worn". They stack per module - a piece built out of arcane essence that also carries an arcane gem counts twice.
• Cinder essence uses slot any, so one gem grants fire immunity wherever it sits, worn or held. The attribute caps at 1 and the handler treats anything at or above 1 as immune, so extra pieces neither add nor dilute.
• Material properties belong under the default key, not armor or handheld. A gem socketed into armour is not tagged armor: gem modules declare which material properties they accept and list only default plus their own gem tags. Anything filed under armor/handheld silently never applies to a socketed gem. The attribute's own slot is what decides where it counts.