Tree Carve

Leave a message on a tree.

Someone walks past a birch at the edge of your base and finds three words cut into it. That is the whole mod.

No new item to craft

You already have the tool. Sneak and right-click a log with any sword, and the face you hit becomes a carved message. Any wood, any tree, vanilla or from another mod — as long as the log still has its bark. A stripped log is the one thing you cannot carve: an axe would have nothing left to take the message off with again. Any sword will do, including one from another mod.

Your sword is otherwise untouched. A plain left-click chops the log exactly as it always did, with no modifier and nothing to unlearn.

The tree remembers, until it doesn't

A carving belongs to the trunk it was cut into. Fell the tree and the message is gone with it. Take an axe to the bark and the log strips exactly as it always has — and the message strips off with it, the way a real mark disappears under the blade.

Nothing to undo, nothing to clean up. If you want the words gone, do the same thing you would do to a real tree.

How it looks

The bark is untouched. Only the letters read as fresh-cut timber, in a shade taken from that species' own stripped wood — so an oak carving and a warped stem carving look like their own trees rather than the same paint on two backgrounds.

Arrange it however you like

The carving screen is the block face itself, drawn on that log's own wood. Place text and symbols where you want them, drag them, stretch them, turn them — what you arrange is what lands on the trunk. Text can be bold, italic, underlined or struck through, and every line picks its own hand from five, including the alphabet off an enchanting table and the runes off an illager banner.

Seventeen symbols

Hearts filled and hollow, an umbrella, a skull, stars, a flower, a note, the sun, a cloud, a snowflake, an anchor, a crown, an arrow, a cross — and the aiaigasa, the umbrella two names shelter under. A carving can be a declaration, a shelter marker or a warning without the words having to say so.

Lay a line of text over a symbol and it reads as cut into it.

A resource pack can bring artwork of its own in as one more symbol, and a datapack decides which ones a world offers.

Cut it in colour

Carrying a dye? Cut a piece in it. The colour tints the wood rather than covering it, so a red heart is still a cut in a trunk and not a sticker on one — and the dye is spent, the way it would be.

Made to fit your server

Type @ and pick from everyone who has ever played here; the name stays, the @ goes.

A message is rewritten only by whoever cut it, so nobody's words get quietly replaced under their name — though an axe still takes any carving off, for anyone standing in front of it.

Carving can be switched off, held to shorter messages, or opened up to planks and stripped logs. All of it changes in game, and everything past a barked log stays off until you say otherwise — the wiki has the list.

Requirements

Minecraft 1.21.1, on Fabric or NeoForge.

Requires Architectury API (CurseForge). On Fabric it also needs Fabric API (CurseForge) and Fabric Language Kotlin (CurseForge); on NeoForge, Kotlin for Forge (CurseForge).

Links

Full documentation lives on the wiki.

Found a bug, or want something carved that the mod cannot cut yet? The Discord picks reports up automatically and replies in your thread when the fix ships.

The mod is free and stays free — you can sponsor the author if a tree ever said something worth reading.

License: "If you make money, I make money" — free to use and redistribute for free; commercial use needs a revenue-sharing agreement. Full terms.