Aechronis Essentials

A Fabric client mod for Minecraft 26.2 that colors player and entity hitboxes by relationship - town, nation, ally, enemy, or neutral - using Aechronis's public Nodes map API.

This is a from-source, GPLv3 port of the hitbox-coloring feature from oreotrollturbo's CrusalisUtils (itself a fork of the mod "Hitbox+"), retargeted from Crusalis's Dynmap/Towny API to Aechronis's own Nodes API. It is not a full port of CrusalisUtils - see "What's intentionally left out" below.

What this mod does

• Recolors vanilla's F3+B debug hitboxes (auto-enabled on startup, no need to press F3+B yourself) for players and other entities, based on a configurable priority chain:
  1. Your own hitbox - configurable self color.
  2. Players on your manual friend list - configurable friend color.
  3. Players on your manual enemy list - configurable enemy color.
  4. Automatic relation lookup against Aechronis's live town/nation data (https://map.aechronis.net/nodes/towns.json): same town, same nation, allied nation, enemy nation, or neutral - each with its own configurable color.
  5. Vanilla scoreboard teammates - configurable friend color, as a fallback.
  6. Everyone else - configurable neutral color.
• Non-player entities (hostile/passive mobs, projectiles, decorations, vehicles, the Ender Dragon, and misc entities like item frames/TNT/XP orbs) get their own configurable enable/color/alpha toggles, independent of the relation system.
• Recolors the F3+G chunk-border debug lines by territory ownership, using the same relation pipeline (so ally/enemy/town land shows up at a glance), driven by https://map.aechronis.net/nodes/world.json.
• Full settings screen via Mod Menu + Cloth Config.
• Optional: automatically sends /t spawn in chat the instant you respawn after dying (off by default - toggle in config).

The mod only activates when you're connected to an Aechronis server (*.aechronis.net) - it's inert everywhere else.

What's intentionally left out

CrusalisUtils bundles a lot of unrelated quality-of-life features alongside hitbox coloring. None of the following were ported - they're listed here because upstream itself isn't well documented, so if you're used to CrusalisUtils, this is what you'd be missing:

• Waypoint / navigation - pathfinding to towns/ports/territories (/navigateTo, /findTown, /findPort, /findNode), auto-creating and advancing Xaero minimap waypoints as you travel.
• Flag-to-waypoint war tracking - parsing war/Towny chat messages (attacked, captured, liberated, defended) for towns on a watchlist, auto-placing/removing waypoints at the fighting.
• Player coordinate/location "ping" sharing - broadcasting your position or a raycast-targeted block via chat (with optional XOR+Base64 "encryption"), auto-parsed by other users of the original mod into temporary waypoints.
• Automatic nation detection & watchlist population - auto-detecting your nation on login and filling the war-flag watchlist with your nation's towns.
• Rally point markers - /rallyPoint x y z time name broadcasting a timed waypoint via chat.
• Scoreboard rotation - rotating the vanilla scoreboard sidebar to face your look direction, as a pseudo-compass.
• Port travel eligibility filtering - restricting navigation routing to nation/ally-owned ports.
• Player "glow" highlighting - a chat-protocol-based feature to make a specific ally glow.
• Chat/announcement utilities - special hotbar-styled announcement/DM display tied to the original mod author's account; join/leave message hiding.
• Remote feature kill-switch - a hidden server-sent chat string that could disable pings/sharing/hitbox-colors/flag-waypoints at runtime.
• Misc commands - /ores (inventory mining-yield stats), /setPlayerRelation, /pinLocationPing, an easter-egg command. (The underlying friend/enemy name-list config is kept - it's just config-file/GUI-only in this port, with no command or keybind to populate it.)
• Update checker - pinging Modrinth on the title screen for update notifications.
• JourneyMap integration.

Changes from upstream behavior

• Only MAP_DATA relation detection is supported (pure Aechronis Nodes lookup). Upstream also had modes that parsed color codes out of nametag/tab-list prefixes; those aren't ported since Aechronis's nametag/tab convention isn't confirmed the way the map API is.
• The manual "Register Team" keybind and per-team-name friend/enemy mapping system was cut; only the plain friend/enemy player-name lists remain, edited via the config screen.
• Bug fix: upstream force-set every hitbox's alpha to a hardcoded 1.0 after computing the real per-relation alpha, so the alpha/transparency sliders in the config never actually reached the renderer. This port applies the real computed alpha instead.
• Dropped a no-op mixin wrapper and an unused, dead BoxRenderUtil.drawBox() method that never issued any actual draw calls in upstream - hitbox rendering runs entirely through vanilla's own debug-hitbox line renderer, recolored via Mixin; nothing in this mod builds its own vertex mesh.
• towns.json is polled every 2 minutes (upstream: 1 hour); world.json (needed for chunk borders, ~16MB) is polled every 10 minutes since land claims change far less often than town/nation membership.
• Bug fix: upstream's auto-/t spawn-on-respawn feature latched a "just respawned" flag that was never reset, so it only ever fired once per game session (the first death only). This port resets the flag on every death, so it fires on every respawn as intended.

Building

Requires JDK 25. Uses Fabric Loom 1.17 / Gradle 9.7 / Fabric Loader 0.19.3 / Fabric API 0.157.0+26.2, targeting Minecraft 26.2.

./gradlew build

License

GPLv3 (see LICENSE), matching the license on oreotrollturbo/Crusalis-utils- (master branch). Credit to oreotrollturbo for CrusalisUtils, and to the original author(s) of "Hitbox+" that CrusalisUtils itself was forked from.