Ground Burst

Assemble it. Launch it. Watch the horizon.

Build your own arsenal from raw ore, from grenades and landmines to ICBMs and the Tsar Bomba, then watch real mushroom clouds, craters and radioactive fallout reshape your world. Hold your ground with radar, interceptors and a bunker of your own.

NeoForge · Minecraft 26.3, 26.1.2 and 1.21.1 · singleplayer and servers · shader packs, Distant Horizons and JEI · Create on 1.21.1

Nuclear blasts that change the land

A flash, a shock front and a mushroom cloud you can see for miles; then a crater cut into the terrain, fires, and fallout that drifts with the wind. Measure the radiation with a Geiger counter, put on a hazmat suit, and watch a wasteland spread over the scorched ground.

Missiles that really fly

Assemble a missile part by part, pick one of 24 warheads and launch it from a silo, a launch complex or a cruise launcher. It climbs, stages, re-enters and lands where you aimed, up to 30,000 blocks away. Radar tracks it, and interceptors can shoot it down.

Superweapons

The SCUD Storm, the Nuclear Missile Silo and the Particle Uplink Cannon, a homage to Command & Conquer: Generals – Zero Hour. Call them down with a Laser Designator and steer the cannon's beam across the ground. Or build something stranger: antimatter, a black hole, a supercell storm or a deep freeze.

A base worth defending

Blast doors whose handwheel draws the bolts, hatches with a ladder built in, a command room with consoles and tape computers, air-raid sirens, searchlights, Jersey barriers and dragon's teeth. One Launch Control Station aims every launcher you own, anywhere in the world.

Cold War sites to explore

Seven abandoned sites lie out in the world: a Titan II missile silo, a command bunker, a radar outpost, a nuclear test site, a crashed missile, a waste repository deep in salt and a research station over the End. Each is fitted out as it was left, with blast doors, consoles, bunk beds and searchlights, loot in the crates and lockers, and a breaker still on in every room.

Industry from the ground up

Mine uranium and refine it in gas centrifuges, grow silicon crystals and print microchips in a Clean Room. Fission, fusion and singularity reactors power the machines that build your arsenal, and Auto Assemble keeps a production line running.

Healing for forever worlds

Turn healing on and the damage grows back over time, block for block as it was: chests with their contents, machines with their settings, other mods' blocks too. Creepers' and TNT's holes can heal as well. War, without wrecking the map for good.

Everything in it

• Explosives: grenades, Molotov cocktails, placed charges with a remote detonator, landmines, bouncing mines and claymores.
• 24 warheads, from high explosive, napalm and cluster to neutron, cobalt and the Tsar Bomba, and the missiles to carry them.
• Launchers: launch silos, a launch complex, a cruise missile launcher and a Vertical Launch Battery that ripples sixteen missiles onto one area.
• A Launch Control Station that networks every launcher you own: aim on a map of the world, fire salvos timed to land together.
• A Laser Designator to call fire from up to 1,024 blocks away; laser-guided missiles follow your beam.
• Artillery: an 81 mm mortar and a 155 mm howitzer, aimed from a strategic view over the battlefield.
• At sea: horned sea mines, moored or adrift, and depth charges thrown or rolled off a stern rack.
• Exotic weapons: antimatter, a black hole, a supercell storm and a deep freeze, built whole into ICBMs.
• Superweapons: the SCUD Storm, the Nuclear Missile Silo and the Particle Uplink Cannon.
• Defence: a Radar Array, an Interceptor Battery and the Interceptor Complex; a missile warning receiver, air-raid sirens, klaxons, bells and rotating beacons.
• The aftermath: craters, fallout, radiation, Geiger counters, hazmat suits and a wasteland biome.
• Industry and power: new ores, processing machines with upgrade chips, fission, fusion and singularity reactors, and a chip chain from raw silicon to quantum circuits.
• Seven abandoned Cold War sites to explore, fitted out and with loot: a Titan II missile silo, a command bunker, a radar outpost, a nuclear test site, a crashed missile, a waste repository deep in salt and a research station over the End.
• Building blocks: bunker doors and hatches, a command room, bunker fittings, barriers and drums for the yard, chain-link fencing, barbed wire, sandbags, warning signs, a Large Silo Door and a Search Radar that turns.
• Healing, off until you turn it on, with full control over when, how fast and what grows back.
• The Field Manual, an in-game guide to all of it.

More pictures in the Images tab.

Built with its players

Ideas from the comments and the Discord ship quickly: healing for vanilla explosions and shader-pack support both came from players' requests. Tell us what you want next.

Getting started

1. Install NeoForge and GeckoLib for your Minecraft version, then Ground Burst, on the server and on every player's game.
2. Every player gets the Field Manual the first time they join (or craft one from a book and gunpowder). It shows every block, item and machine, how to build it and what it does.
3. With JEI installed, press R on any item to see how it is made.

For servers

• Big blasts are worked through a little each tick, so the server keeps running through a nuke.
• Settings for how big blasts are and what they may destroy (or nothing at all), radiation, fallout, missile range and the superweapons.
• Healing puts a war-torn map back the way it was, on the schedule you choose.

Works with

• Shader packs (Iris): fireballs, smoke and mushroom clouds draw right and look the same in every pack (tried with Bliss, Complementary Reimagined and Unbound, BSL, Photon, Solas and MakeUp Ultra Fast). On 26.3 and 1.21.1.
• Distant Horizons: blast effects stand in front of its far terrain. On 26.3 and 1.21.1.
• JEI: every recipe, every machine.
• Create and Create Aeronautics (Minecraft 1.21.1, optional): launchers on trains, bearings and airships, every machine working on moving contraptions and ships, and weapons that hit them.

Create and Create Aeronautics in detail

• Every machine rides along: Create's moving contraptions (trains, mechanical bearings, pistons, gantries, pulleys and minecart contraptions) carry launchers, missile assemblers, Launch Computers, Launch Control Stations, Radar Arrays, generators, capacitor banks and the processing machines. Glue or attach any part of a formed structure and the whole of it moves. Carried, a machine keeps working: an assembler goes on building its missile, a generator burns its fuel.
• Menus on the move: right-click a carried machine, or any block of a carried structure, to open its menu, or its screen for a Launch Computer, Control Station or Radar Array.
• Power and pipes aboard: a contraption's generators and capacitor banks power every machine on it, no cables needed, each getting a fair share. Item and fluid pipes on it keep working, moving things between its machines, the launchers' Item Ports and Create's chests, vaults and tanks.
• Launchers on the move: aim, arm and fire one as always from a Launch Computer, a Launch Control Station or a Laser Designator. It counts down and launches from wherever the contraption or ship has it, its missiles heading the way it points. Set down again, a structure forms where it lands and stays on its network. Missile launchers, superweapons and both interceptor launchers all work this way.
• Create Aeronautics ships, planes, cars and boats: a launcher aboard works as it does on the ground, and a Launch Computer, Control Station or Radar Array aboard a ship works there too, seeing the world from where the ship has taken it.
• Weapons hit ships and contraptions: a warhead's, shell's, bomb's or charge's blast breaks their blocks in its reach, just as it breaks the world's (dense blocks still shield what is behind them), and shoves ships away, turning them by the side that faced it. What a blast sees of a ship is scorched and may catch fire. Missiles and shells hit ships and contraptions in their way instead of passing through, and a chest or machine blown off one goes with what it held.
• The special weapons too: the Particle Uplink Cannon's beam burns down through ships and contraptions under it, the Cryo ICBM's freeze ices them over, a singularity pulls ships in and swallows them, and antimatter erases whatever of them it reaches.
• Aim at a ship: the Laser Designator's beam lands on a ship where you see it and missiles home on it there; a mortar or howitzer aims at the ship, at its height.
• Depth charges off a ship: a Depth Charge Rack aboard a Create Aeronautics ship rolls its charges off into the sea, and Create's funnels load it as hoppers do.
• Not yet: reactors pause while carried, and pipes and cables on a contraption reach only what is on it, not the blocks round it.

Made and tested with Create 6.0.10, Create Aeronautics 1.3.2 and Sable 2.0.6.

FAQ

• Forge or Fabric? NeoForge only.
• Minecraft 1.20.1? Not at the moment: 26.3, 26.1.2 and 1.21.1.
• Will a nuke lag my game? Big blasts are spread over many ticks, and the settings can make them smaller or keep them from breaking blocks at all.
• Can I stop explosions wrecking my builds? Yes: limit what blasts may destroy, or turn on healing.
• Can I use it in a modpack? Yes, freely.
• Bedrock or Pocket Edition? No, Java Edition only.
• Does the server need it? Yes, the server and every player.
• Where do I start? Open the Field Manual.

Settings

Ground Burst can be tuned to your world: how big blasts are and how much they may destroy (or that they destroy nothing at all), radiation and fallout, missile range, the superweapons, your own effects (flash, camera shake, quality), and healing, which makes the damage grow back over time. Healing is off until you turn it on.

How to change the settings

In game: open Mods, choose Ground Burst, then Config. Hover over any setting to see what it does.

• Minecraft 26.3: the world settings are under Synced Settings. Change them from the title screen or in a single-player world.
• Minecraft 26.1.2 and 1.21.1: the world settings are under Server Settings. Open a single-player world, press Esc, then Mods, Ground Burst, Config.
• On a multiplayer server, a player can't change the world settings: the server's owner edits its file (below).

In the file: open the config folder inside your Minecraft folder (on a server, inside the server's folder) and edit one of these in any text editor. Every setting has a note above it saying what it does.

• groundburst-synced.toml (26.3) or groundburst-server.toml (26.1.2 and 1.21.1): the world settings, healing among them
• groundburst-client.toml: your own effects and the HUD

Save the file, then start the game (or the server) again.

Healing

To turn it on: under [healing], set enabled = true (in game: Healing, then Heal damage over time). By default an area starts to grow back 5 minutes after the last blast near it and takes at most 5 minutes to heal, with everything just as it was: chests and their contents, machines and their settings, cables and pipes working again, other mods' blocks too. You can change when it heals (after a wait, every morning, or only when an operator says), how fast and in what order, which weapons, blocks and dimensions heal, and what happens to blocks players have built in a crater. The game's own explosions heal too (creepers, TNT, end crystals, ghasts' fireballs, the Wither, beds and respawn anchors), and other mods' explosions that use the game's explosion code, each with a switch under Other explosions. Operators also have /groundburst heal now, /groundburst heal forget and /groundburst heal status. Only damage done while healing is on comes back, so turn it on before the war starts.

Requirements

Ground Burst comes in three files, one for each version of Minecraft; take the one for yours:

• Minecraft 26.3: NeoForge 26.3.0.92 or newer, and GeckoLib 5.5.7 or newer (required)
• Minecraft 26.1.2: NeoForge 26.1.2.126 or newer, and GeckoLib 5.5.2 or newer (required). The recipes that use Minecraft 26.2's sulfur and cinnabar are not in it.
• Minecraft 1.21.1: NeoForge 21.1.265 or newer, and GeckoLib 4.9.3 or newer (required). A few things are simpler on it: Rad-Away, Potassium Iodide Tablets and the Anti-Rad Injector are used as food is (with no nourishment), the pointer stays an arrow over the mod's screens, and flash particles are not tinted.
• JEI (optional) on any
• Iris (optional) on 26.3 and 1.21.1, for shader packs
• Distant Horizons (optional) on 26.3 and 1.21.1: blast effects stand in front of its far terrain
• Create 6 and Create Aeronautics (with Sable 2) (optional, Minecraft 1.21.1 only), for the machines and weapons on moving structures above

Install it on the server and on every player's game: it adds blocks and items, so both sides need it.

Modpacks

You are free to include Ground Burst in any modpack.

Planned

• Contamination that sticks to you and your gear, and more fallout and aftermath protection
• War room displays
• Seismographs
• A Dead Hand system
• More underwater and naval weapons
• Being considered: handheld weapons based on the special warheads

Links

• Source code: GitHub
• Found a bug? Report it on the Issues tab, or in the Discord.
• Questions, ideas and feedback: join the Ground Burst Discord.
• What changed in each version: the Changelog of each file, or the full changelog.

Credits

• GeckoLib for the animated models, and JEI for recipe lookup.
• The superweapons are a homage to Command & Conquer: Generals – Zero Hour. Ground Burst is not affiliated with Electronic Arts.
• Ground Burst is released under the MIT licence.

Sound credits

Some of the mod's sounds are made from recordings shared on Freesound. Each was changed: cut, cleaned of background noise, filtered, slowed or layered with others and with synthesized sound.

Licensed CC BY 4.0:

• "FX - Rock / stone falling debris" by bolkmar, https://freesound.org/people/bolkmar/sounds/539178/
• "BurlingtonIndustriesImplosion.wav" by the_toilet_guy, https://freesound.org/people/the_toilet_guy/sounds/98852/

Licensed CC0 1.0 (public domain): recordings by aerror, Andriejus, Breviceps, cambrianman, cognito perceptu, craigsmith, csengeri, deleted_user_7146007, dnewtonjr, dwareing, elonen, Ev-Dawg, F3ather, frankelmedico, Garuda1982, greenbastardd, Groovy_Studio, Iamgiorgio, interkin3tic, jasonLON, joneekemp, julujanus, Kinoton, klangfabrik, kyles, megashroom, modusmogulus, nooly, northern87, Nox_Sound, nuckan, parabolix, pedrgloria, pyer75, qubodup, Rudmer_Rotteveel, RytmenPinnen, sevenbsb, Sheyvan, sidohzen, sirkhandijoan, SpaceJoe, SpooksJH, squashy555, ThabzMalik, TiesWijnen, unfa and Yoyodaman234. Each recording, with its link, is listed in CREDITS.txt.