Mirage Blocks

Mirage Blocks

A river you can swim forever without arriving, and ground you can walk forever without crossing. Mind the fog, and try not to get lost on the way back.

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Mirage Water

It looks like water. It behaves like water. You can swim in it, drown in it, and carry it in a bucket.

You just can't get across it.

Wade in and the mist closes around you. Swim out as far as you like — the far bank never comes any closer, and the one behind you is long gone. There's no wall, no invisible barrier, no message telling you to turn around. Only water, in every direction, for as long as you care to keep going.

And every stroke away from shore is a stroke you'll owe on the way home. Turn back and the swim costs exactly what it cost to get out — not a scripted timer, just the distance you actually covered, charged back to you.

Mirage Ground

The same trick runs on solid blocks.

Point /mirage convert at the block in your hand and every one you place from that stack becomes mirage ground. Walk out across a field of it and you will never reach the other side. Sprinting doesn't help. Jumping doesn't help — the ground knows you're still above it.

Any block works, including blocks from other mods. What you place stays exactly the block you placed: same texture, same sounds, same behaviour. Nothing about it looks unusual. That's the point.

Mirage Flowers and Lanterns

Two things carry the mirage with them, and neither needs a single block marked.

Mirage flowers. Fill a cauldron with mirage water and dip a flower in it. It comes out bleached grey — and it comes out as that flower. Dip a poppy, get a grey poppy. Dip an allium, get a grey allium. All fourteen vanilla flowers work.

Mirage lanterns. Use a mirage water bucket on a placed soul lantern and the colour drains out of it.

Plant either one and the ground for 16 blocks around it stops leading anywhere. Nothing about those blocks changes — they're the same blocks they always were — they simply forget how to take you anywhere. Break the flower and the area lets go.

The radius is configurable.

Getting Across

There are ways over. They just aren't the obvious ones.

• Fly — creative flight or an elytra passes straight over
• Bridge — lay your own blocks above it and walk your own path
• Boats? Caught in the illusion like everything else, by default. Turn boatsAffected off if you'd rather rowing worked

Commands

Command	What it does
/mirage convert	Turns the block in your main hand into a mirage block
/mirage revert	Turns it back
/mirage status	Explains why the mirage is or isn't active where you're standing
/mirage mark	Turns the block you're looking at into mirage ground
/mirage unmark	Turns it back
/mirage fill <from> <to>	Turns every solid block in a region into mirage ground
/mirage unfill <from> <to>	Turns them back

Mirage water itself comes from a Mirage Water Bucket, in the Mirage Blocks creative tab.

Configuration

config/mirageblocks-common.toml

Option	Default	What it does
fogRadius	24.0	How far you can see once the mirage has you
innerRadius	28.0	How close the loop ever lets you get to where you started
loopLength	6.0	How much open space is needed before the mirage will engage
useDrag	false	Slow travellers continuously instead of moving them
dragDistance	48.0	How gradually that slowing sets in
sourceRadius	16.0	How far a mirage flower or lantern spreads the effect
boatsAffected	true	Whether boats are caught too
hideEntities	true	Hide every other entity — mobs, items, boats, players
hideParticles	true	Suppress particles, so your own trail can't betray a hop
enableFog	true	The mist. Turn it off only to see how the trick works

Game Rules

/gamerule mirageMobAggression false

Stops anything targeting a player the mirage has hold of. On by default — being lost is more unsettling when something else is in there with you. Set it per world, in game, no restart.

Building One

The mirage only arms if it can hide both edges. Somewhere too small to get lost in is left alone — a puddle stays a puddle, and a garden path stays a path.

• Size: open water or marked ground reaching about 34 blocks from wherever people enter (that is innerRadius + loopLength)
• Depth: water needs to be at least 2 blocks deep, right from the bank
• Source and flowing water both count, so a river poured from a bucket works fine

If nothing seems to happen, /mirage status will tell you which of those it is.

Multiplayer

Works on servers. Other people caught in the mirage are hidden from you while you're in it — each of you is somewhere different in the story, and seeing each other would give the game away instantly. Anyone standing on the bank or bridging over the top stays perfectly visible.

They're hidden, not gone. You can still hear them, and you can still walk into them — so two people lost in the same mirage can fight without ever seeing each other, going by sound alone. Turn hideEntities off if you'd rather that were a normal fight, at the cost of the illusion.

The mod costs a server almost nothing: the work per player doesn't grow with how much mirage water exists, or how many flowers are planted, or how many people are lost in it at once.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge
• No dependencies, no client-side requirements beyond the mod itself

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Early release. If you find a way across that shouldn't work, that's a bug — please report it.