Combat Traces

Combat Traces adds pixel-art weapon trails and hit effects to Better Combat, giving every swing, thrust, and heavy strike a clearer visual impact.

Watch ribbons follow your weapon through the air, then see a matching flash when your attack connects—all styled to fit Minecraft’s pixel-art look.

• Trails that follow your weapon: Ribbons trace the movement of blades and weapon heads, including longswords, claymores, and greathammers.
• Different effects for different attacks: Wide swings create horizontal cuts, overhead attacks create vertical cuts, and thrusts produce puncture effects. Blunt weapons get their own impact bursts.
• Clear, visible hits: Brief hit flashes appear over struck entities and follow them for their short lifetime.
• Cleaner windups: A configurable minimum swing speed and windup suppression help trails appear during the attack itself.
• Elemental flair: Fire Aspect adds fiery visuals, with additional elemental styles available for modpacks and custom setups.
• First-person and third-person support: See your own weapon trails and those of nearby players.
• Adjustable visuals: Customize opacity, width, lifetime, effect size, render distance, and particle limits. Individual effects can be switched off.

All effects are cosmetic. Weapon damage and combat balance remain unchanged.

Built for Minecraft 1.21.1 on NeoForge, using Better Combat 2.4.x and its required dependencies. Tested with Simply Swords and AsyncParticles.

For reliable multiplayer hit effects, install Combat Traces on both the client and server. Resource packs, datapacks, and an integration API provide further customization for modpack creators.

Source code and issue tracker