Envenom

Coat your blade. Lace their bread.

Envenom adds two ways to deliver a potion's effects without throwing the potion: coating a melee weapon, and lacing food. Both run off ordinary brewed potions, so your existing brewing stand is the front end for the whole kit — no new blocks, no new ores, no new dimension.

Coating a weapon

1. Weave cloth

String  String          ->   2x  Cloth
String  String

Plain Cloth is the blank a brew soaks into — and the rag you wipe a blade down with later.

2. Steep it

Potion of Poison  +  4x Cloth     ->   4x  Poison Coating Cloth

Any brewed potion works. No lingering potion, no dragon's breath, no trip to the End. The recipe is shapeless, and coating cloths stack, so you prepare a satchel before a job rather than brewing mid-fight.

3. Wipe it on a weapon

Coating Cloth  +  Iron Sword      ->   Poison-Coated Iron Sword

You get your own weapon back — same durability, same enchantments, same anvil name — now carrying the coating. Coating an already-coated weapon renews it and resets the wear.

4. Hit something

The target catches the potion's effects at ⅛ duration, the exact math vanilla uses for tipped arrows. A successful hit bursts potion-coloured particles and hisses; a failed one is just an ordinary hit.

Poison-Coated Iron Sword
  Poison (0:05)
  Coating: 62%  ▓▓▓▓▓░░░

A coating is not spent in one hit — it wears. A fresh coat lands every time; a thinning one starts failing, more and more often, until it flakes off and the weapon is ordinary again.

Roughly seven effects delivered per cloth, or about 28 from a single potion once it's been split four ways.

Changed your mind?

Plain Cloth  +  Coated Weapon     ->   the weapon, clean

Name, tint and tooltip all revert. Durability and enchantments untouched.

Lacing food

Put a potion in the crafting grid with some food. The dose splits evenly between the portions.

Potion of Poison (0:45)  +  5x Bread     ->   5x Bread, 0:09 each

What comes out is ordinary food. Same name, same texture, same tooltip. Nothing marks it out — except to you. The food remembers who laced it, and only that player sees a discreet "Laced by your hand" line. The victim gets no warning, and neither does anyone else who picks it up.

It pays out when the food is actually swallowed, so a victim interrupted mid-bite gets away with it.

What can be coated

Swords, axes, spears, maces and tridents. Bows and crossbows are excluded on purpose — vanilla tipped arrows already own that niche.

Coatings apply to melee hits only:

• A thrown spear or trident delivers nothing; coating one buys you stabs, not throws.
• A swing fully stopped by a shield neither applies the effect nor costs a use.
• Retaliation damage such as Thorns doesn't count as a swing.
• Only the main hand counts, because that's the hand vanilla attacks with.
• A sword's sweeping edge coats every mob it catches — and spends one use per mob. Powerful and expensive in equal measure.

Configuration

Server-side, synced to clients so the tooltip always agrees with the server.

maxHits is stamped onto the weapon when it's coated, so retuning the config never silently rebalances coatings that already exist in your world.

FAQ

Can I use this in a modpack?

Yes — go ahead, no need to ask. Envenom is MIT licensed. Public packs, private packs, servers, paid-hosting packs, all fine. A credit link is appreciated but not required.

Do I need it on both the client and the server?

Yes. The mod adds items, recipes and data components, so client and server both need it. Joining a server that has it without having it installed will not work.

Which loader and version?

NeoForge, Minecraft 26.2. There's no Fabric or Forge build.

Does it work with weapons from other mods?

Yes. Coatable weapons are driven by the item tag envenom:coatable, which ships containing #minecraft:swords, #minecraft:axes, #minecraft:spears, minecraft:mace and minecraft:trident. Any modded weapon on those vanilla tags works with no extra setup, and a datapack can add more with no code.

Modded weapons get the full mechanics but keep their own appearance — the potion-coloured overlay only ships for vanilla weapons, since each overlay is hand-fitted to a specific silhouette.

Can I feed laced food to villagers or mobs?

No — laced food only affects players. Villagers eat through a completely different code path that never triggers the "finished eating" hook, so poisoned bread handed to a villager does nothing. This is a genuine limitation rather than a bug, and it means the lacing half of the mod is effectively multiplayer content.

Why won't laced food stack with normal food?

Minecraft decides stacking by item components, and laced food carries an extra one. This is kept on purpose. A completely undetectable poison is a mechanic with no counterplay — a player who notices their stacks refusing to merge has earned the right to be suspicious. It's the only defence the system offers, so it stays.

Can people tell laced food apart some other way?

The hiding is presentation only. The component syncs to every client, so F3+H advanced tooltips will reveal that the item carries something extra, and a modified client could show it outright. If you're running a server where that matters, know it up front.

Why does a Potion of Harming not get split?

Instantaneous effects — Harming, Healing — ignore duration entirely, so splitting one across eight loaves produces eight full-strength doses rather than eight weak ones. That's deliberate: it makes instant potions the expensive, lethal option rather than the useless one.

Where are the recipes in the recipe book?

Weaving cloth and steeping it appear in the recipe book normally. Coating, cleaning and lacing cannot — their output is your weapon or your food rather than a fixed item, which Minecraft's recipe book has no way to display. Those three are taught by an advancement chain instead, each one describing the craft.

Do the tridents and spears look coated?

They work, but they don't show the overlay. Their item models use a special in-hand renderer, and compositing over it would flatten a held trident into a flat sprite. Mechanics over cosmetics.

Is it safe to add or remove mid-world?

Adding is safe. Removing will leave coated weapons and laced food carrying unknown components — wipe coatings off with a plain cloth and eat or discard laced food before uninstalling.

Will this mod be updated for later versions of Minecraft?

This mod is developed at my convenience, and may be updated to newer versions of Minecraft once existing versions become outdated.