AimExpert

AimExpert 1.0.1

A client-side Forge mod for Minecraft 1.8.9 that replaces the vanilla crosshair with a custom one. It adds a rounded settings screen, shareable crosshair templates, and the 1.0.1 features: hit breathing, a black outline, and two-color gradients.

Version: 1.0.1
Author: EndWithMe

AimExpert runs on the client. You do not need it on a vanilla server just to use the crosshair. Only the server-relayed sharing method needs the mod on the server as well.

The settings screen opens with M by default. You can change that in Controls. AimExpert is released under the MIT license.

Settings screen

Press M in game. The panel uses black, gray, and white with rounded corners and translucent cards. Cards slide in from top to bottom when the screen opens and slide upward when it closes. Use the scroll wheel to move through cards, or drag the scrollbar on the right. ESC, the x in the top-right corner, or a click outside the panel will close it.

You can switch between English and Chinese at any time from the General card. All text updates immediately.

There are seven cards: General, Crosshair, Gradient, Paint, Dynamic, Templates, and Sharing.

General covers language, background blur, blur strength, transition animation, the key hint, and version information. Crosshair covers the custom crosshair toggle, hiding the crosshair, black outline, size, opacity, trigger distance, how other players are treated, and the five crosshair type toggles with their RGB colors. Gradient covers the gradient toggle, colors A and B, six directions, and speed. Paint is the pixel editor. Dynamic covers movement and attack reactions, hit breathing, spread, response speed, toggle animation, animation duration, and direction. Templates handles saving, loading, deleting, copying, pasting, and restoring local templates. Sharing handles sending templates, relay status, and pending shares.

Closing the screen saves your settings locally. Older settings still work, and any missing options fall back to defaults. If the black outline was on, the gradient is turned off when settings load.

Crosshair

The vanilla crosshair is removed and replaced with the current template, drawn point by point.

There are five built-in types:

• Normal: a cross with an open center.
• Friendly: a dotted ring.
• Hostile: a thicker X.
• FOV: four corner brackets.
• Attack: a radiating pattern.

Each type has its own color. Size and opacity are shared across all five. Turning on Hide crosshair hides both the vanilla and custom crosshair. Turning off Custom crosshair returns you to the vanilla one.

Trigger distance defaults to 8 blocks. AimExpert uses its own ray check rather than the vanilla entity pick, which stops at roughly three blocks, so normal aiming at a mob can trigger the hostile or friendly crosshair. Other players can be treated as hostile, friendly, or ignored.

Priority, from highest to lowest:

Attack > hostile or friendly target > FOV > Normal

If a type is disabled, the mod falls down that order, so you will not end up with nothing on screen just because one toggle is off.

Black outline

The Black outline option in the Crosshair card adds a one-pixel black ring around every crosshair point. The outline color is fixed black; there is no outline color setting.

The outline and gradient cannot be active at the same time. Turning on the outline turns off the gradient, and turning on the gradient turns off the outline. The two switches stay in sync in the interface.

Each point is outlined separately, so two diagonally adjacent points can produce a small black patch between them. That is the expected result of per-point outlining, not a missing piece.

Hit breathing

The attack crosshair breathes large, small, large when you click. Shorter gaps between clicks make each breathing cycle shorter. After you stop, the crosshair returns to its normal size. The breathing amount is adjusted in the Dynamic card, from 10% to 100%, and it can be turned off.

A few things are worth knowing:

• The attack crosshair itself needs both Dynamic crosshair and Attack changes enabled in the Dynamic card. Without those, there is no attack crosshair, so there is nothing to breathe.
• Breathing speed is based on click intervals, so holding left click to mine also produces breathing; the rhythm follows your actual swings.
• The breathing amount multiplies the dynamic spread. If the spread is already large, the two effects together can look exaggerated. Lower the breathing amount if it feels like too much.

Gradient

When Gradient crosshair is enabled in the Gradient card, all five crosshair types use a gradient from color A to color B. The per-type colors are ignored while the gradient is on.

There are six directions:

• Left to right
• Right to left
• Top to bottom
• Bottom to top
• Center to edges
• Edges to center

Gradient speed goes from 0% to 100%. At 0%, the gradient is not off; it simply stops moving. Higher values make the color flow faster along the chosen direction. The gradient is calculated over the whole crosshair bounding box, and each point takes different colors at its corners, so transitions stay continuous between points.

Gradient colors are local. They are not shared with templates, so someone loading your template still uses their own gradient colors.

Paint board

The Paint card is a pixel editor, so you do not have to write patterns by hand.

Choose the pattern to edit at the top left: Normal, Friendly, Hostile, FOV, or Attack. The grid size runs from 5 to 21. Left click draws a point, right click erases, and dragging draws continuously.

Symmetry mirrors your edits up, down, left, and right at the same time. Most crosshair patterns are easier to draw with it on.

Clear, invert, copy pattern, and paste pattern are one-click actions. Copy and paste work between different pattern types.

Changes apply to the current template immediately, and both the in-game crosshair and the preview in the Crosshair card update with them.

Save as template stores the template locally. If the name is empty or uses the built-in name, AimExpert replaces it with a unique name instead of failing because of a duplicate.

Templates

The built-in template is Local. Your own templates are stored locally. A template carries the five patterns, size, and opacity. Colors, including gradient colors, stay on each player’s side, so loading someone else’s template will not overwrite your color scheme.

Templates can be copied and pasted as text. That makes them easy to share in chat, on a forum, or anywhere else that accepts text.

Sharing

There are two ways to share a template.

The first is in-game relay. You can send a template to a player, or to everyone on the server who has AimExpert. The sender sees a confirmation. The receiver gets a clickable chat prompt asking whether to accept the template, with Accept and Decline options. Accepting imports the template immediately. The Sharing card also shows relay status and pending shares.

Relay uses the server as a middleman. If the server does not have AimExpert, the interface shows that server relay is unavailable and suggests the second method.

The second method is copy and paste. Copy the template text, then paste it to save it as a new template. This does not require the server to have the mod, and it works well for chat groups, forums, or any other text-based sharing.

Background blur and Optifine

Blur uses only vanilla rendering. It approximates a Gaussian blur by downsampling and using linear filtering. It does not need a shader pack, Optifine, or OpenGL 3.

The world frame is captured before the GUI is drawn and blurred later, so clearing the GUI does not break the blur.

Optifine is optional. When shaders are active, the vertical texture direction is flipped. If the blur path runs into an error, blur is disabled for that session and the screen falls back to a plain dark overlay instead of crashing the game.

License

MIT license. Copyright (c) 2026 EndWithMe.