Create/Mekanism Modular

A Truly Modular addon for Minecraft 1.21.1 / NeoForge. It adds 72 materials drawn from Create, Mekanism, Ice and Fire, Iron's Spells 'n Spellbooks, Create: The Air War, Create: Cosmonautics and Aeronautics: Interstellar Expansion, so those mods' metals, gems, scales and essences can 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.

Titanium is the exception: Air War and Cosmonautics both add a titanium ingot, so one material covers both and draws its ingredients from c:ingots/titanium rather than an item id. Cosmonautics already declares that tag; the tag files in data/c/ fill it in for Air War, which ships no common tags, using optional entries so a missing mod is not an error.

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.