Simple Drills NBT Loss Fix

Simple Drills Safe Break is a server-side Forge addon for the Simple Drills mod on Minecraft 1.20.1. It intercepts drill break events and cancels them when the target block is a BlockEntity, preventing shulker boxes, modded containers, machines, and other tile-entity blocks from being destroyed during bulk excavation.

The core problem is straightforward. Simple Drills breaks blocks in a radius, fast and indiscriminately. Any BlockEntity caught in that radius — a shulker box packed with endgame loot, a Mekanism digital miner, a Create gearbox, a Sophisticated Backpack sitting on the ground — gets destroyed without dropping its contents. The items inside are gone permanently. There's no undo, no recovery, and at drill speed, no reaction time. One careless activation near a base or storage area can wipe hours of progress in a single tick.

Simple Drills Safe Break hooks into Forge's BlockEvent.BreakEvent pipeline. When a drill initiates a block break, the mod checks whether the target block has an associated BlockEntity via level.getBlockEntity(pos). If one exists, the event is cancelled and the block remains untouched. Everything else — stone, ore, dirt, deepslate — breaks normally. The check is minimal and adds no meaningful performance overhead, even when drilling at maximum radius.

This covers a wide range of blocks automatically without needing a manual whitelist or blacklist. Any block that registers a BlockEntity is protected: vanilla chests, barrels, furnaces, brewing stands, shulker boxes, hoppers, decorated pots, signs with NBT data, mob spawners, modded energy cells, fluid tanks, crafting terminals, and vehicle entities from mods like Create or MrCrayfish's Vehicles. If a mod adds a new container or machine tomorrow, it's already covered as long as it follows standard BlockEntity conventions.

Installation is drop-in. Place the JAR in your mods folder alongside Forge 47+ and Minecraft 1.20.1. No client-side installation needed, no config files, no commands. The mod registers its event listener on the server side at startup and operates passively from there. It has a single class — SimpleDrillsSafeBreak.java — with no dependencies beyond Forge and Minecraft itself.

The mod is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3 (LGPL-3.0), so you're free to include it in modpacks, use it alongside proprietary mods, and distribute it — provided that modifications to this mod's own source remain open under the same license. It's targeted at a specific and common frustration in any modpack that pairs Simple Drills with storage or tech mods — drills eating containers they shouldn't touch.