Sable: Destructive

Turn Sable physics into physical destruction.

Sable: Destructive is a server-and-client addon for Sable on Minecraft 1.21.1. It makes moving Sable structures respond to collisions and explosions with material-aware block failure, flying physics fragments, world craters, debris and cinematic impact effects.

Build a vehicle, aircraft, ship or moving base and crash it into the world. Weak contact blocks crush first, hard materials resist longer, detached pieces preserve their motion, and a sufficiently large body can create a radial crater with a visible pressure wave and rising column of dust.

Physical block damage

Every meaningful contact is evaluated using relative speed, reduced contact mass, kinetic energy, block mass, material toughness and the hardness of the attacking surface.

• Block-by-block damage by default: ordinary collisions remove the actual contact block instead of carving long layers through the world.
• Material compatibility: soft grass, leaves or dirt cannot destroy obsidian simply because more soft blocks are attached behind them.
• Capped mass leverage: large structures hit harder, but mass cannot provide infinite strength to a weak contact face.
• Attacker self-damage: when a soft projectile hits a hard wall, the projectile can erode while the wall survives.
• Low-speed protection: a single stone block dropped from approximately two blocks will bounce or stop instead of drilling downward indefinitely.
• Finite ordinary materials: stone, metals, obsidian, netherite and reinforced blocks are resistant, not immortal. A proportionate high-energy collision can still break them.
• Protected infrastructure: bedrock, barriers, command blocks, structure blocks and portal infrastructure remain intentionally unbreakable.

Optional penetration and cluster detachment can be enabled for more destructive servers. Penetration is energy-limited, requires extreme speed and is capped to prevent tunnelling.

Two destruction outcomes

When a block fails, Sable: Destructive chooses a result appropriate to the material and impact:

• VANISH: brittle or heavily overloaded blocks pulverize into textured dust, grit and fragments without filling the world with dropped block items.
• DETACH: suitable blocks peel away as independent Sable physics bodies that keep their inertia, tumble and collide with the environment.

Container contents can still be released, while unsafe block-entity detachment paths use the safer destruction outcome.

Giant landings

Large falling Sable bodies produce a multi-stage impact only after the system confirms real terrain contact:

1. A bright contact flash marks the instant of collision.
2. A dusty shock ring and a faster translucent pressure front expand across the ground.
3. Physical rock and soil fragments launch upward, fall under gravity and bounce off terrain.
4. A turbulent dust column rises above the crater and expands as it loses opacity.
5. Delayed skirt dust and secondary rubble settle around the impact site.
6. Layered boom, ground rumble and cracking sounds communicate the scale of the hit.
7. Distance-scaled camera and FOV vibration deliver a sharp kick followed by a slower tremor.

Crater radius, depth, entity knockback, effect density and camera movement scale with the impact and remain bounded for gameplay stability.

Custom visual pipeline

The addon contains nine dedicated particle shaders:

• Structural shatter
• Textured dust
• Ground shockwave
• Sparks
• Contact flash
• Boundary grit
• Volumetric impact plume
• Pressure wave
• Faceted rubble

Dust and debris use Minecraft world collision. Effects attached to moving Sable sub-levels are simulated in local space so they travel with the structure instead of appearing at an unrelated point in the sky.

Built for multiplayer

Heavy impacts use a compact event packet. The server sends impact position, radius, severity and a deterministic seed once; each nearby client builds the full visual sequence locally.

Performance protection includes:

• Distance-based visual LOD
• Respect for Minecraft's All, Decreased and Minimal particle settings
• Shared per-tick client particle budgets
• A limit on concurrent impact sequences
• Server-side effect and destruction budgets
• Spatial and temporal effect deduplication
• Deferred Sable mutations at safe tick boundaries

Client-only screens and shaders are isolated from dedicated-server code.

Configuration and commands

Operators can open the live configuration screen with:

/sable-dv config panel

The alias /sable config panel is also available.

Other commands:

/sable-dv on
/sable-dv off
/sable-dv config reset

The panel controls damage gates, self-damage, penetration, detach behaviour, shockwave radius, crater depth, knockback, epic impact effects, camera shake and particle density. Settings persist in config/sabledestructive-common.toml.

Commands and server-side panel changes require operator permission level 2.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.235+
• Sable 2.0.3+
• Java 21

Install the mod on both the client and server. Sable and its own required dependencies must also be installed.

Compatibility notes

• Designed for Sable 2.x physics sub-levels.
• Vanilla TNT, creepers, end crystals and other explosions can damage Sable structures through the same protected destruction pipeline.
• Unknown modded blocks receive conservative finite defaults so they do not become accidentally immortal.
• World terrain damage can be disabled if a server wants destruction restricted to Sable structures.
• Replace old versions completely and restart Minecraft after updating; do not hot-swap the JAR.

Credits

• Code: Xylos_Official
• Visuals: Viaquelt
• Sable physics engine and API: ryanhcode

Licensed under the MIT License.