Brama - Advanced Medieval Gates

Brama — Medieval Gates

Minecraft 1.20.1 · Forge

Castle gates that are actually gate-sized. Build a wall of blocks, strike it with a Gate Hammer, and they lock together into one working gate — up to seven blocks wide and nine tall — that swings, lifts or falls as a single piece.

Four kinds of gate, eleven timbers

Medieval Gate — a timber double gate. Two leaves hinged on the outer edges, swinging apart like a double door. Mineable with an axe.

Portcullis — an iron grate that winches straight up, clearing two thirds of its height so the doorway opens without the grate ever leaving its slot. Mineable with a pickaxe.

Drawbridge — a deck hinged along its bottom edge. Raised it seals the gateway; lowered it becomes a walkable bridge, held on chains. The only gate whose blocks physically relocate as it moves, because a bridge has to lie somewhere its own doorway isn't.

Bascule Drawbridge — the later design. Counterweighted beams pivot above the gateway and chain down to the deck's far corners, so beams and deck swing together as one linkage.

The gate and both bridges come in oak, spruce, birch, jungle, acacia, dark oak, mangrove, cherry, bamboo, crimson and warped, each with its own artwork at every gate size and crafted from its own logs. Every wood is exactly as tough as every other — pick the one that suits the castle, not the one that survives longest.

Building one

1. Lay out a solid rectangle of gate blocks, flat against one axis.
2. Right-click it with a Gate Hammer.

The blocks fuse into a single gate and it starts working immediately. Hit it with the hammer again to take it apart.

Eleven footprints: 2x3, 3x3, 3x4, 3x5, 4x4, 4x6, 5x3, 5x5, 5x7, 7x7 and 7x9. Which ones are buildable is a server config option, so you can restrict big gates on a survival server.

Sieges

An assembled gate does not shatter in one hit. It wears down in stages — up to five, per gate type — and every block of it degrades together, so you can see how close a gate is to falling.

• Explosions cost a gate a stage rather than blowing a hole in it. Creepers can be made harmless to gates while TNT still works.
• Battering rams and other siege mods are handled without either side knowing about the other. Any outside force removing part of an assembled gate costs it a stage and the block is put back — including WorldEdit and machinery from mods this one has never heard of.
• Set any of it to plain block-breaking instead if you'd rather.

Gates that watch their own gateway

An enemy walks up to an open gate and it shuts in their face. Who counts as an enemy is answered in three steps, and it stops at the first answer:

1. Anyone who may open the gate never does — the owner, co-owners, trusted players, trusted scoreboard teams, and the owner's allies according to a claim mod.
2. Anyone on the owner's list always does — /gate enemy add <player>, which covers every gate you own rather than one doorway at a time.
3. Otherwise the claim mod decides — standing inside the gate owner's claim without being a member or an ally of it is enough.

With no claim mod and nobody listed, nothing happens; a gate in the wilderness cannot tell an enemy from a passer-by. One config switch makes it treat everyone who cannot open it as hostile instead.

Claim mods: FTB Chunks (with FTB Teams for alliances) and Open Parties and Claims are read through their own APIs, so an alliance signed in their menus opens gates straight away. Everything else that protects blocks — Flan, GriefPrevention ports, a server's own plugin — is covered by a generic probe that asks the question every protection mod already answers. None of it is a dependency, and the whole feature can be switched off.

Ownership

Whoever assembles a gate owns it, and by default only they can open it.

Every command except /gate enemy applies to the gate you are looking at — no coordinates, no selection.

Operators bypass the lot, in creative mode. Permission level alone used to be enough, which made a moderator playing the server's own survival world a skeleton key: every locked gate on the map opened to them, and nothing told the owner. Creative mode is the mode you are in when you are administrating rather than playing. Both halves of that rule are configurable, and the whole ownership system can be switched off if you would rather gates stayed public.

Mobs know the difference

A lowered drawbridge is a safe walkway as far as pathfinding is concerned — villagers and animals will cross it instead of walking round. Raise it and they route away again. This works for mobs from other mods too, without any patching on either side.

Configuration

Server-side and per-world, so it syncs to clients and travels with the save.

Per gate type — damage stages, mining hardness assembled and loose, blast resistance both while protected and while vulnerable, and how long it takes to open.

Shared — which sizes can be built, hammer durability, whether outside forces damage or dismantle gates, ownership rules, admin permission level, how explosions are treated, and everything the siege watch does: radius, sweep interval, which claim mod to ask, whether allies are trusted automatically, and whether defenders are warned.

Every option is commented in the file itself, including why the defaults are what they are.

Resource packs

Built to be reskinned. Every texture and model is replaceable by an ordinary resource pack — no code and nothing to register.

One image covers a whole gate rather than tiling per block, and a pack can supply art per gate size at full resolution: 48x48 for a 3x3, 112x144 for a 7x9. Replace a single base texture and it applies to every size; supply sized files and those take over.

Models are ordinary Blockbench-editable JSON, and body models carry shape only — their UVs are ignored and the mapping follows whatever you build. Full documentation ships inside the jar under assets/brama/readme.md.

Recipes

Each wood is crafted from its own logs — spruce gates from spruce logs, warped from warped stems.

Gates are built by the dozen, so blocks come four at a time — but a full castle gate is a serious investment, and a 7x9 portcullis is the most expensive thing in the mod by a distance.

Open source

MIT, at github.com/mikiolo098761-lgtm/brama. Issues and pull requests welcome.