Federation Of Kaos: Kaos Protocol

You are not a soldier with a supply chain. You are keeping a handful of dying guns alive.

Kaos Protocol is a progression and upkeep layer for TaCZ (Timeless and Classics Zero). It owns no guns. It decides how TaCZ guns are unlocked, how they wear, jam, foul and get repaired, and how good each one is through three graded internal parts. Minecraft's economy is infinite; guns are balanced for economies that are not. Kaos makes firearms a finite, maintained, logistically constrained resource, so the first assault rifle you find does not end the game's threat curve.

It comes with:

• Weapon Blueprints: learn a gun by salvaging one you found, plus a gem, at a grindstone 📜
• Durability on every gun and attachment: wear per shot, handling penalties when worn, a dead trigger at zero ⚙️
• Realism mode: worn or dirty guns jam, and fouling builds until you clean it 🧹
• The Gun Repair Table, where every repair costs iron and leaves a permanent scar 🔧
• Barrel, Action and Frame parts from Common to Legendary, fitted at the Gun Upgrade Bench 🧩
• A silencer trade: far less aggro, 15% less damage, twice the fouling 🔇
• Silencer-aware gunfire noise for Outbreak Protocol, hit markers and a first-join starter loadout 🎯

📜 Learning a weapon costs a weapon

Only the Glock 17 is craftable at the TaCZ Gunsmith Table from the start. Every other gun is blueprint-gated: the craft is refused until you have learned that gun.

• Salvage: put a TaCZ gun and a gem in a vanilla grindstone to get a Weapon Blueprint for that gun. Tier 1 and 2 guns take a Diamond; Tier 3 rifles and DMRs (AK-47, M4A1, SCAR, HK416, AUG, FAL, G3, Kar98k, M700 and more) take a Diamond Block. The gun must be empty, unchambered and have no attachments.
• Salvaging destroys the gun but hands back every upgraded part it carried, plus an iron ingot for each stock part.
• Learn: right-click the blueprint. It is consumed and the gun is unlocked for you permanently, through death. Blueprints come only from salvage, never from loot.
• Heavy weapons are events, not gear. The M249, RPG-7, AWP, M107, Minigun, M95, FN Evolys and M320 are loot-only: never salvaged, never learned, never crafted and never repaired.

A found gun is therefore a three-way decision: a weapon to carry, a source of parts, or a blueprint.

⚙️ Every gun is dying

Every gun and attachment has a max durability by category (pistols 800, SMGs 1200, rifles 1000, shotguns 750, snipers 600, machine guns 1000). Each round costs one point on the gun and on every fitted attachment. Below roughly 35 to 50% condition the handling degrades (bullet speed, aim-down-sights, fire rate, recoil, spread); damage is never reduced by wear. At zero the gun is broken: the trigger only clicks until it is repaired. A broken attachment ejects into your inventory.

Realism mode (a server flag, on by default) adds two separate problems with two separate remedies:

• Wear jams: only below 30% condition, rising to the category's full chance at 5% (pistols and SMGs 15%, rifles and snipers 20%, shotguns 33%, machine guns 10%). The remedy is repair.
• Fouling: builds over the gun's whole life, about 150 rounds from clean to fully fouled, free for the first quarter and then up to +6% jam chance. Action-bar warnings at 50% and 85%, and a second bar on the gun icon shows cleanliness. The remedy is the Cleaning Kit (a stick, string, wool and an iron nugget; eight uses; hold for three seconds).

Total jam chance is capped at 35%. The round that jams still fires; the next is refused, and the message tells you whether the gun is worn out or fouled. Clear a jam by pressing TaCZ's inspect key: the gun plays a clear-the-round animation and the server frees it when it ends. Launchers, attachments and a few guns (Minigun, FN Evolys, Lonetrail, the revolvers) never jam or foul. The tooltip shows Durability, Jam Chance and Fouling so you can tell the two problems apart.

Standard mode switches jamming and fouling off entirely. Guns still wear out and break. The flag flips live when the server config is saved, and every player is told the mode on join.

🔧 Repairs leave a scar

The Gun Repair Table (five iron, a smithing table, a grindstone and two logs) is the only workshop repair. One iron ingot restores 20% of the item's factory max durability (a nugget restores a ninth of that), the table uses only what it needs, and every repair also clears a jam and strips all fouling for free.

But every repair scars: it permanently takes 15% of the factory max off the item's maximum. A 1000-durability gun is 850 after one repair, 700 after two. The item bar shows the lost maximum as an orange segment, the tooltip reads Durability: 850 / 850 (scar −150), and the table refuses a repair that would push the max below 10%. Six repairs at the defaults, then the gun is scrap. Anvils cannot touch guns, crafting-grid combining is off, and Mending is disabled on guns and attachments. The only field repair is Carry Pack's Gunsmith Kit: a partial repair on a cooldown.

🧩 Loot is a parts hunt

Every gun except launchers is an assembly of three internal parts, Barrel, Action and Frame, each Common, Rare, Epic or Legendary. Every gun from loot, crafting or the starter kit is all Common. The worst part sets the damage (70%, 85%, 100%, 120%) and the name prefix ([Rare] AKM); the Barrel scales headshots and range, the Action fire rate and reload, the Frame spread and recoil. Epic is the gun pack's own stats.

Fit parts at the Gun Upgrade Bench (a Gun Repair Table, a diamond, iron and logs) or at a placed Carry Pack's Gunsmith Kit. Parts are per gun family (pistol, SMG, rifle, shotgun, sniper, machine gun), 54 obtainable items in all, and a replaced upgraded part comes back to you. The mod ships part loot tables by tier for pack makers; in the Federation Of Kaos pack they feed tiered Lost Cities gun chests, the Special Infected and Kaos Hunter's marks, with Legendary parts only in the deepest caches. A chest stays worth opening after you own every weapon class.

🔇 The quiet is paid for

Every shot sends a noise pulse to Outbreak Protocol at the gun's fire-sound radius. A silencer cuts that radius by 75% (64 blocks down to 16) and, because the Director is told the unsuppressed radius too, a suppressed shot costs a quarter of the horde budget. In exchange every suppressed shot hits for 15% less, and under Realism the gun fouls twice as fast. The tooltip says so, and either half of the penalty can be switched off in config. Noise is the counterweight to firepower.

🎯 Starter loadout and feedback

• First join: a worn iron helmet and boots, a loaded Glock 17 at 2% durability (about sixteen shots), and, when those mods are installed, Outbreak's Field Ration, Augment Protocol's Tactical HUD augment and four Patchouli guide books. It signals scarcity, not a head start: build a Gun Repair Table early.
• Hit markers: any damage you deal flashes an X at the crosshair with a click, red on a kill. Detected server-side.
• /kaos realism reports the active mode; /kaos reload-starter [player] re-issues the loadout (operators).

🛠 Config and data

world/serverconfig/fok_kaos_protocol-server.toml: the Realism flag, the repair table's scar fraction and floor, the suppressed-fire damage and fouling penalties, Cleaning Kit uses, the starter loadout toggle, salvage iron, and quality scaling. Per-gun durability, jam and fouling values live in a bundled gunDB JSON datapack that packs can override. Everything is decided on the server; the client only predicts so it never shows a shot the server will refuse.

✅ Requirements

• Minecraft 1.20.1 with Forge 47 or newer.
• TaCZ (Timeless and Classics Zero) 1.1.8 or newer, required.
• Optional: Outbreak Protocol (gunfire noise, starter ration), Augment Protocol (starter Tactical HUD), Patchouli (starter guide books), Carry Pack (field Gunsmith Kit).
• Install on both the client and the server.

Part of Federation Of Kaos

Kaos Protocol is the firepower axis of the Federation Of Kaos modpack, a post-apocalypse survival shooter: scarcity comes from the world, not the workbench. In the pack, firepower is bought with logistics (parts, iron, cleaning kits, condition) while Augment Protocol sells capability for slots and Outbreak Protocol keeps the pressure on that makes both cost something. Carry Pack's Gunsmith Kit calls Kaos for field service, and Kaos Hunter's marks drop its parts. It runs on its own with TaCZ in any Forge 1.20.1 pack, and you are welcome to include it in yours.