Kaiju Strike Designator

Kaiju Strike Designator 2.0 is a complete rewrite. In the old version you placed a device and waited for a timer. Now the designator is a scoped weapon you carry around, and the strike it calls in is much bigger and much easier on your server. It also doesn't need GeckoLib or Flywheel anymore.

What happens when you fire

Look through the scope at any spot up to 640 blocks away and pull the trigger. A laser locks on, you raise the designator to the sky, and its nuclear core vents a column of green radioactive gas straight up through the clouds.

That gas is an offering, and the camera goes with it. Out of the atmosphere, past the Moon and the Sun, out of the Milky Way and across the empty space between galaxies, until it reaches a ringed planet a very long way from home. Something huge is floating in front of it. Kakuō, the Isotope Sovereign: a hooded figure with nothing inside the hood except two red eyes.

It catches your offering and eats it, and its eyes turn radioactive green. Then it thanks you, chants a ritual, calls out the name of the attack and fires. You ride the beam all the way back to Earth. Kakuō is fully voiced, and everything it says is subtitled.

Down on the ground nobody is bored while they wait. Everyone nearby gets a countdown. The sky turns dark and violet, a storm forms over the target with lightning flickering inside it, and a glowing sigil gets projected onto the ground. Loose blocks start to float, and anything standing close by is slowly dragged toward ground zero. As the beam gets closer, a star swells in the sky.

Then every sound in the game cuts out for a second and a half.

Impact. Black and white ink frames, a white-out, a moment of slow motion, and then the beam itself: a white-hot core inside a blue-violet column that lights up the land around it. A shockwave rolls out across the ground, bending the air and throwing debris. If you're far enough away you'll see it before you hear it, because the boom travels at the speed of sound.

The whole sequence lasts about a minute. Press Jump to skip it, or switch the cinematic off in the client config if you only care about the explosion.

What's left afterwards

The crater is carved out right behind the shockwave. It's a bowl with a glowing shaft bored down the middle, green trinitite glass, magma and irradiated rock on the floor, and a rim of thrown-up ground around the edge. Hills in the way get cut down into slopes. On an Apocalyptic strike the shaft goes through bedrock and out the bottom of the world.

Around the crater is the blast zone. Buildings come down depending on what they're made of. Glass and wood break a long way out, stone holds until roughly twice the crater radius, and nothing survives at the rim. Trees close in are knocked flat, the ones further out are charred, and the ground is scorched and burning.

After that a mushroom cloud climbs over the crater and ash starts to fall. The crater floor glows for about a minute while it cools, and the fallout zone stays radioactive for two minutes by default.

Strike modes

Atomic Breath is the main one. One beam on one point, a crater and a mushroom cloud.

Breath Sweep lets you mark a start point, then fire at an end point. The beam ploughs a molten trench between the two.

Pinpoint charges in 6 seconds and plays a short version of the cinematic. The crater is small and the cooldown is a quarter of the normal one, so this is the one to use in a fight.

Every mode comes in three sizes: Tactical (crater radius 24), Strategic (64) and Apocalyptic (128).

It is not gentle with living things. Anything within 1.25 crater radii dies on impact, and armour, totems and Resistance won't save it. The blast deals up to 100 damage and stays dangerous most of the way out to four crater radii, throwing everything outward and setting it on fire. Players in creative or spectator mode are always safe.

Controls

Key	What it does
Hold Use	Look through the scope (scroll to zoom)
Attack while scoped	Fire
Hold V	Strike menu. The inner ring picks the mode, the outer ring picks the yield
N while scoped	Thermal view
Jump	Skip the cinematic of your own strike

The designator never wears out. Strikes use Nuclear Cores instead: one per strike, or three for Apocalyptic. After you fire you reload. The spent core pops out of the bay and your off hand slots a fresh one in.

Crafting

Kaiju Strike Designator:

Spyglass         Nether Star    End Crystal
Netherite Ingot  Dragon Head    Netherite Ingot
Netherite Block  Nuclear Core   Netherite Block

Nuclear Core (makes 4):

Redstone Block   Glowstone      Redstone Block
Echo Shard       Nether Star    Echo Shard
Redstone Block   Glowstone      Redstone Block

Yes, it takes a dragon head and two Nether Stars before you can fire once. It's meant to be an endgame item.

Running it on a server

The old version could drop a server to around 10 TPS while it dug a crater, so the carving code was rewritten for 2.0. It edits whole chunk sections directly, works within a small time budget every tick starting with the nearest chunks, and picks up where it left off if the server restarts in the middle of a strike. Several strikes can run at the same time, and players who join halfway through still see what's going on.

The server config lives in serverconfig/atomicbreathrailgun-server.toml, and you can also edit it from the Mods menu in game. With it you can:

• turn off block damage, bedrock breaking, scorched ground or fires
• stop strikes from hurting players
• scale the crater sizes up or down, or put a cap on them
• list blocks a strike must never touch (by default it destroys everything, bedrock included)
• make strikes respect land claims and spawn protection
• lock the Apocalyptic yield to operators, or turn it off completely
• change fuel use, the cooldown (20 seconds by default), range, charge time, how many strikes one player can have going at once, the allowed dimensions, radiation and how long fallout lasts

Operators also get /kaijustrike strike <pos> [mode] [yield] [sweepEnd], /kaijustrike cancel and /kaijustrike list.

On the client side, config/atomicbreathrailgun-client.toml lets you lower the effect quality and turn off the mushroom cloud, impact frames, screen shake, the cinematic camera or the subtitles.

Good to know

• Needs NeoForge for Minecraft 1.21.1, installed on both the client and the server. No other mods required.
• Shader packs work. While an Iris shader pack is active the full-screen effects step aside and a simpler beam is drawn instead.
• Flashing lights: the impact has bright flashes and black and white frames. You can tone them down or turn them off with flashStrength and impactFrames in the client config.
• Coming from 1.0? Back up your world first. Designators carry over, but the old placed device doesn't exist anymore.

Credits

Every sound effect is cut from CC0 recordings on Freesound by 0ktober, Aegersum, BaggoNotes, borralbi, BrainClaim, brunoboselli, Dave Welsh, derjuli, dpren, Electroviolence, ERR0, gurie, IanStarGem, ImAFoley, Jacco18, Jarusca, kaboose102, Kinoton, leonelmail, LilMati, LordHannes, metrostock99, midimagician, modusmogulus, newagesoup, Nox_Sound, Paul368, peepholecircus, Poligonstudio, PrdiChlp, quadraslayer, qubodup, reg7783, renatalmar, rhapsodize, rrehl, SamsterBirdies, SGAK, shelbyshark, Sonicfreak, spookymodem, squashy555, stratcat322, suntemple, Svarvarn, TheDonkey, TheLittleCrow, Tim_Verberne, ubecareful and unfa. Kakuō's voice was generated with ElevenLabs.

If you enjoy the mod, you can support me on Ko-fi.