BloodyPunch

A brutal survival mechanic for hardcore and expert modpacks. Your bare hands are not tools — and the world will remind you.

What it does

Punching hard materials (stone, ore, wood) or mobs with an empty hand inflicts Hemorrhage — a custom, escalating bleed that ignores armor and can kill you. The more you punch, the worse it gets.

Features

• Escalating bleeding — consecutive bare-fisted hits ramp up: direct damage → Bleeding I → II → III and beyond. The streak resets after a couple of seconds without a hit.
• Bleed from taking damage too — consecutive cutting/piercing hits (mob attacks, sweet berry bushes, cactus, dripstone…) also make you bleed.
• Armor won't save you — Hemorrhage bypasses armor. No tanking your way through it.
• Tool-gated harvesting — hard blocks can't be broken at all without the correct tool (an axe for wood, a pickaxe for stone). Try without one and you just bleed for nothing.
• Held mining counts — holding to mine a hard block bare-handed bleeds you too.
• Visual feedback — blood sprays from your hand and the point of impact, your arm gets progressively bloodier (visible to other players in multiplayer), and struck blocks get a fading blood stain.
• Configurable — mark "flimsy" items (paper, seeds…) that still count as a bare fist, editable in the config (supports modded items).

⚠️ Important — read before installing

This mod gates tool progression hard: without an axe or pickaxe you cannot harvest wood or stone. On its own, this can soft-lock a fresh world. It's meant to be paired with an alternative early-game tool source — for example Pedernal Tools (flint tools obtained from gravel). Install a tool-progression mod alongside it, or play it in a pack built around it.

Requirements

• NeoForge 1.21.1
• Required on both client and server.

Part of my upcoming Industry Nightmare mod pack.