MC Toolkit

Minecraft guides — page 6

Practical write-ups on commands, datapacks, building and server performance — each one paired with the tool that does the work.

Damage types: which 19 ignore armour, and why shields are the weaker guard

26.3 ships 51 damage types. 19 bypass armour, 30 bypass shields, and the overlap is not what people assume — every type that beats armour also beats a shield.

2026-08-01Commands & Data

Eighteen trim patterns, fourteen places, and only one that drops from a mob

Trail Ruins gives four of the eighteen. Tide is the only pattern that is not loot. And duplicating a template is a crafting table, not a smithing one — with two exceptions.

2026-08-01Building & Resources

Enchantment conflicts: only 21 of 43 conflict with anything, and six do most of it

26.3 ships 43 enchantments. 22 conflict with nothing at all, level 3 is the most common cap, and Curse of Vanishing applies to more items than any other enchantment.

2026-08-01Commands & Data

Eight items have exactly one way in, and three have a way that exists only for them

Nether Star is the only Boss Drop, Dragon Egg the only One-Time item, Command Block the only unobtainable one. Plus the eight things no chest, craft, trade or cat will ever give you.

2026-08-01Building & Resources

Horse breeding: two perfect parents still cannot guarantee a perfect foal

The foal centres on the parents' midpoint, but the spread carries a floor of 0.3 × the stat range no matter how identical the parents are. That term never goes away.

2026-08-01Building & Resources

Slim or classic: the game reads your account, and a tool has to guess from 24 pixels

The game takes slim or classic from your account's skin setting, not the PNG. A tool given a bare PNG has to guess from two columns a slim arm leaves empty. Plus the full UV map and why legacy 64×32 skins get mirrored.

2026-08-01Building & Resources

A map pixel is one byte, and two of its bits are brightness

61 base colours × 4 shades = 244 colours from a 16,384-byte array. Only one of the four shades is the colour's full value; the other three are darkened to 86%, 71% and 53%.

2026-08-01Building & Resources

Gold is the fastest tool in Minecraft, and netherite is only 12% faster than diamond

Tool speed multipliers run 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 — and gold sits at 12, above netherite. The upgrade you grind for is the smallest step on the ladder.

2026-08-01Building & Resources

Negative coordinates break chunk maths in two places, not one

Truncating division puts block −1 in chunk 0 instead of −1, and a plain % gives an in-chunk offset of −1 instead of 15. Both are off, and both look right until you go west of spawn.

2026-08-01Commands & Data

Only the head is a cube — every other papercraft part is three different rectangles

Six parts, 36 faces, 1,632 square skin-pixels of paper. The head's six faces are identical; the body's come in three sizes; the arms and legs in two. That decides how each net folds.

2026-08-01Building & Resources