Colonial Arms

• Colonial Arms

Guns the way they were actually used in the 1700s, in Minecraft. Three flintlocks you load with paper cartridges and a ramrod, and two cannons that take a crew to serve. Nothing here is a reskinned bow. Every weapon has the drill of the real thing: the loading, the lock time, the flash and the boom, the recoil, and a period model you can see being worked in your hands.

• The flintlocks

Three guns, one drill. Hold right-click with a Paper Cartridge in your inventory and the gun comes off the shoulder: the cartridge goes to the muzzle and is tipped in, the ramrod comes out and is driven down the bore stroke by stroke, then the hammer is drawn back to full cock with a click. Let go early and the charge is not seated, so you start over. Hold right-click to aim, left-click to fire.

Pulling the trigger is not the shot. The flint strikes, the pan flashes at the lock, and the ball leaves a beat later, aimed where you are looking at that moment. Then the gun kicks into your shoulder and the muzzle rises, in first and third person. You can fire from the hip without aiming, but the spread is wild.

* **Flintlock Musket.** The line-infantry piece. A ball does 24 damage (12 hearts), so an unarmoured target drops to one shot. Four strokes of the rod and a 4.5 second reload. Shouldering it steadies the aim and gives an iron-sight zoom (the blunderbuss has a gentler one). Unloaded, it swings as a butt-stroke.
* **Flintlock Pistol.** The sidearm, one-handed, cheaper. 13 damage, two strokes, 3.5 seconds to reload. Wider spread than the musket, aimed or snapped.
* **Blunderbuss.** The copper-belled coach gun. Fires eight pellets of shot at 5 damage each, full strength out to 8 blocks and fading to a quarter at 20. Nasty close, useless far. Three strokes and 4 seconds to reload.

A Paper Cartridge is paper, gunpowder and a Musket Ball, and one iron ingot casts eight balls.

• The cannons

Two pieces: a **Field Cannon** on a spoked-wheel carriage with a trail, and a smaller **Naval Cannon** on a truck carriage. Place either on the ground and it is a real object: it has a hollow bore, a vent on the breech, trunnions, and it rolls.

Serving one is the historical drill, and it is built for a crew. Any player can do any step, and it is more fun when several do:

1. A **Powder Charge** goes in at the muzzle. It slides into the bore and waits.
2. The **Rammer** drives it home, all the way to the breech.
3. A **Cannonball** goes in at the muzzle, and the rammer drives that home too.
4. A pinch of priming appears on the vent. The gun is ready.
5. A lit **Linstock** touched to the vent fires it. The vent flashes, everyone stands clear, and half a second later the piece goes off.

The Linstock is an iron head on a stick with a length of slow match. Light it with Flint and Steel in your other hand, or by using it on a fire, and the match burns for about five minutes. The Powder Charge is a paper bag of three gunpowder; a cannon takes a lot more powder than a musket.

A Cannonball does 18 damage on a direct hit and bursts on landing. The blast hurts and throws everything nearby, and it **never breaks blocks**. You can shell a fort without unbuilding it.

**Laying the gun.** Right-click an empty part of the gun to take the gunner's place, standing beside the breech with the barrel and wheel in view. Look to traverse and elevate; the barrel follows your eye, up to 35 degrees of elevation and 10 of depression. W and S trundle the piece slowly forward and back. Sneak to step off.

**Recoil.** Every shot rolls the gun back about a quarter of a block, as it did in the field. Back it against a block and it recoils into the stop and rolls forward to exactly where it fired from. On the field gun it is the iron trail shoe that meets the block, not the wheels.

Hit a cannon hard enough and it comes apart into its item, with whatever charge and ball were in it.

• Horse-drawn

The Field Cannon limbers. Ride a horse, or lead one, up to the gun and use a **Lead** on it: the trail is hooked up, and the gun follows behind on its limber cart, muzzle to the rear the way guns were really moved, wheels turning with the ground, stepping up blocks like a cart. Sneak-use the gun, or use the lead on it again, to unhitch; the lead comes back. The naval gun has no limber.

• Recipes

* **Flintlock Musket** - three iron ingots across the top, flint and a plank in the middle, a plank below.
* **Flintlock Pistol** - two iron ingots over a plank and a flint.
* **Blunderbuss** - as the musket, with a copper ingot for the bell in place of the first iron.
* **Musket Ball** - one iron ingot makes eight.
* **Paper Cartridge** - paper, gunpowder and a musket ball, shapeless.
* **Field Cannon** - three iron blocks over a row of three planks, with two planks below for the wheels.
* **Naval Cannon** - two iron blocks over the same carriage.
* **Cannonball** - four iron ingots in a square make three.
* **Powder Charge** - paper and three gunpowder, shapeless.
* **Rammer** - a plank on two sticks.
* **Linstock** - an iron nugget over string over a stick.

Everything is in the Colonial Arms creative tab.

• Multiplayer

Client and server code are kept apart, so it runs on a dedicated server as well as in single player. Every other player sees the loading, the hammer, the kick and the cannon drill. A gun crew of three works exactly as you would hope.

• Requirements

* Minecraft 26.2
* Fabric Loader 0.19.3 or newer
* Fabric API
* Java 25

• Versions

The 2.x line is Minecraft 26.2 and has everything described here. The older 1.x file for 1.21.1 has the musket, its cartridges and the first cannon only; the pistol, the blunderbuss, the crew drill and the limber are 26.2.

• Credit and license

Colonial Arms is by Ailewic and released under the MIT License.

The first-person and third-person gun rendering approach, and the five musket sound files, are adapted from ewewukek's Musket Mod (MIT, https://github.com/ewewukek/mc-musketmod). Those sounds are themselves derived from CC0 recordings; the full credits ship in the jar as THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt. Every model and texture in Colonial Arms is original, generated from the mod's own geometry code.