Punchy × Essential Compat

The problem

Install Punchy and Essential together, put on an outfit that covers your arms, and your hands disappear. The item you are holding just floats in front of you.

Neither mod is broken. They simply disagree about who draws your arms — and the result is that nobody does.

What this mod does

It gets them to share the work, so your outfit shows up on your own hands:

• Your outfit is drawn on your first-person arms. Sleeves, gloves, claws — whatever your cosmetic puts on the arms, you now see it in first person too.
• It moves with Punchy. Swinging, mining, blocking, sprinting — the outfit follows every animation instead of hovering in place.
• Outfits without sleeves still work. If nothing covers your arms, you simply get your normal skin hands back.

Change outfits in the wardrobe and your hands change with them. There is nothing to set up, no keybinds, no menu.

Installation

1. Make sure you already have Fabric Loader 0.19.3 or newer, Punchy and Essential installed.
2. Download the mod and drop the .jar into your mods folder.
3. Start the game. That's it.

Client-side only — nothing to install on a server, and it works on servers that don't have it.

Will it work for me?

Essential is optional. Without it the mod just sits there doing nothing, so it is safe to leave in a modpack.

No versions for 1.20 or 1.21. Minecraft changed how it draws things in 26.0, and this mod plugs straight into that new system. Supporting older versions would mean writing it a second time from scratch. See TECHNICAL.md if you want the details.

Something looks wrong?

<details> <summary>My hands are still invisible</summary>

Check that Punchy is actually enabled (Mod Menu → Punchy → the mod's own toggle), and that this mod appears in your mod list. If both are fine, open an issue and include the log — the section below explains how to make it useful.

</details>

<details> <summary>The outfit sits in the wrong place, or my skin shows through it</summary>

That's worth reporting. Before you do, check whether it also looks wrong in third person (press <kbd>F5</kbd>) — if it does, the cosmetic itself is off and there is nothing this mod can fix.

</details>

<details> <summary>How do I report a bug properly</summary>

Open config/punchy-essential-compat.json, set "debugLogging": true, restart, wear the outfit that misbehaves, and play for a few seconds. Your logs/latest.log will then list every cosmetic you are wearing and what it covers. Attach that log to the issue along with a screenshot.

</details>

Settings

You do not need to touch these — the defaults are what you want. The file appears at config/punchy-essential-compat.json after the first launch.

If something goes wrong while drawing, the mod switches that part off for the rest of the session and falls back to normal visible hands. It will not crash your game.

Built with AI assistance

This mod was written with the help of AI (Claude). The conflict was tracked down by taking both mods apart and reading what they actually do, and every connection point was checked against the real game files.

What has been tried, and what hasn't:

• ✅ Minecraft 26.2 with Punchy 2.7d and Essential 1.4.0.3 — played in the game. The clip above was recorded on it.
• ⚠️ Minecraft 26.1.x with Punchy 2.6.1 and Essential 1.3.10.x — checked against those files, but nobody has played it yet. It should work. Tell me if it doesn't.

For developers

TECHNICAL.md has the full write-up: what each mod does to the render pipeline, why they collide, how the fix hooks in, and how to build it without Gradle.

Contributions are welcome — especially ports to older Minecraft versions.

Credits

• Punchy by the Punchy team
• Essential by ModCore Inc

This is an independent compatibility patch. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by either project, and it contains no code from either.

License

MIT — do what you like with it.