Tool Arts

Your tools level up as you use them — and the levels unlock abilities you trigger, not quiet percentage bonuses. Right-click into the air, the ability runs, then it has to cool down.

How it works

Every player has a level for each of five tool types: pickaxe, shovel, axe, sword and bow. The level belongs to you, not to the item — a pickaxe that falls into lava costs you the pickaxe, not your progress. Dying costs nothing.

Mining and fighting earn points. Levels go up to 100: the first come in an evening, level 50 after a few weeks, level 100 after roughly 300 hours of play.

The abilities

Everything a tool has unlocked runs at once. Abilities break blocks the way a real click does, so Fortune and Silk Touch apply and the tool wears down as usual.

Rare and strong, on purpose. An ability lasts 5 seconds at first and 21.5 at level 100. The cooldown starts at five minutes and comes down to just under two. You save it for the moment it matters.

Every level-up improves exactly one thing, in rotation: it lasts longer, the cooldown gets shorter, or the reach grows. No level-up is empty.

Why not just VeinMiner?

If all you want is to break veins, use VeinMiner — it's excellent, and it has been for years.

Tool Arts is a different thing: five tools, each with its own path, built up over months, with the vein as one reward along the way rather than a switch you flip on day one.

Points

Valuable blocks count, stone barely does — cobblestone generators and farms are not worth it, without anyone tracking which blocks were placed.

Modded ores get a value from their hardness. Hostile mobs are worth half their health (zombie 10, Wither 150), passive animals a tenth. Other players give nothing.

What you see

• A bar above the hotbar for the tool in your hand: progress, level, and whether the ability is ready. While it runs, the bar turns gold and counts down.
• A title on every level-up, saying what got better.
• /toolarts opens an overview of all five tools.

Requirements

Minecraft 26.2, 26.3 or 1.21.1 · NeoForge, Forge or Fabric (Fabric needs Fabric API) · the NeoForge 26.3 build is beta · client and server — the server sends the bar's data over its own network channels, so install it on both sides.

About this project

Code and documentation were written together with Claude (Anthropic), which I would count as a co-author; the commits say so. The idea and every gameplay decision are mine, and it was tested on my own server. The icon was drawn pixel by pixel by a script, not by an image model. The screenshots are real in-game captures. The mod ships no textures of its own. Source: github.com/shinobiofgloom/tool-arts