Boats N Waves

🚢 Boats n Waves

Build any ship you can dream up, then take her out on a real sea.

Ships n Waves adds boats to Minecraft, but not in the usual cheesy way. Your boats are fully buildable and customizable, out of any blocks you like, with working redstone and real waves to sail on. Anything can be a boat with this mod: a raft, a pirate galleon, a superyacht, even a village house.

There's a physics engine built in for extra realism, and multiplayer support for you and your friends' seafaring needs. Custom blocks include anchors, engines and steering wheels.

This is a bundle of my two mods, Slipway (the ships) and Realistic Waves (the sea), in one jar. I had a lot of fun with this project, so enjoy! :)

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⚓ Set sail in five steps

1. Build a hull in the water, out of anything: planks, stone, glass, wool, you name it.
2. Put in a Ship Core (one holds a ship of any size together), a few Engines low in the hull, and a Steering Wheel on deck.
3. Right-click the wheel. She comes to life and floats. If she'd sink, she tells you why.
4. Fuel her up: right-click an Engine with coal, charcoal, lava or any furnace fuel. All her engines share one tank.
5. Right-click the wheel again to take the helm, and off you go.

Done sailing? Sneak-right-click the wheel and she turns back into blocks.

🌊 A sea that's actually alive

• Waves grow with the water. Puddles stay glassy, ponds barely ripple, lakes get small waves, and the open ocean gets full-size swell rolling in from far away.
• The sea follows the weather. Rain builds it up. Thunderstorms whip up 4–5 block seas (single waves twice that), with whitecaps and spray tearing off the crests.
• Surf and breakers. Waves steepen over the shallows and break on beaches, then crash into cliffs and sea walls in bursts of white water.
• Wakes. Every boat leaves churned water and a V of waves behind her. Fast boats throw bow spray.
• Wind. Windy spells come and go, the wind direction shifts, and leaves and spray drift downwind.

⚙️ Real physics, not fake bobbing

• Floats by her real shape and weight. Wood floats, stone and metal weigh her down, and air inside keeps her up. Pile too many engines on a little boat and she'll swamp.
• Rides the waves. She heaves, pitches and rolls with the sea under her. Big, heavy ships ride steady while small boats get tossed around, and a top-heavy build can capsize.
• Planes. A hull with a pointed or sloped bow gets up on the plane at speed and skips over the waves. Drive her bow in too steep and she plunges.
• Takes on water. The sea comes over her side and through open doors and hatches. Bail her out with a bucket or soak it up with a sponge, or she founders and goes down.
• Takes damage. TNT and collisions knock holes in her and the sea pours in. Patch them by placing blocks back.
• Runs aground. She grinds slowly over shallows, but walls and banks stop her dead (and you can still back off).

🧱 Custom blocks

🏴‍☠️ Everything still works on board

• Redstone, doors, chests and furnaces keep working while she sails.
• TNT cannons fire from her deck, at sea, under way and in a storm. Sea battles, anyone?
• Walk her deck while she moves, sit on her seats, climb her ladders.
• Multiplayer: crew up with your friends. Everyone aboard sees everyone else where they really are on the ship.

📦 Installing

• Minecraft 26.3, Fabric Loader 0.19.5+, Java 25
• Fabric API (required)
• Sodium (recommended): draws the waves when you're not using a shader pack. Keep Improved Transparency off.
• Iris works too. With a shader pack on, the pack draws the water flat, but your ships still ride the waves.
• Multiplayer: install it on the server and every client, the same version on each.
• Already have Slipway or Realistic Waves installed on their own? Take them out: this jar has both inside.

🛠️ For server owners and builders

• config/slipway.properties and config/realwaves.properties hold every setting, each with a note on what it does: speed cap, fuel on or off, how fast ships grind over the bottom, chunk loading round moving ships, and more.
• Ops get /boattest, a toolkit for importing any schematic (.schem, .schematic, .litematic or .nbt) as a ship, draining ships of water, and hollowing out huge builds so they're lighter to sail.

📸 Credits

The ships in the gallery are other people's builds, imported and sailed with /boattest:

• End Ship and the village buildings: Mojang Studios
• Medieval Small Cog by thebigbaron (Planet Minecraft)
• Outrigger Canoes by CC4142 (Planet Minecraft)
• Pirate Ship by TomOnMars (Planet Minecraft)

Screenshots taken with the Photon shader pack.

_{Ships n Waves, Slipway and Realistic Waves are MIT licensed, © 2026 fluidhypr. Slipway's ship shader is adapted from Minecraft's and stays Mojang's. Realistic Waves' water shaders are adapted from Sodium and stay under Sodium's licence.}