Sentinel Shield

Sentinel Shield is a client-side Fabric mod that improves shield combat visibility by coloring shields according to their current state.

The mod also fixes a Minecraft animation issue where another player's shield may sometimes fail to appear raised while they are using it.

Sentinel Shield is designed primarily for PvP, where clearly recognizing shield activation, delay, blocking, and cooldown states is important.

Features

• Clear shield state colors
• Ready state
• 5-tick activation delay state
• Active blocking state
• Shield cooldown state
• Improved shield animations for other players
• Automatic restoration of missing remote shield-use animations
• First-person and third-person support
• Configurable colors
• Configurable color strength
• Optional smooth cooldown color transition
• Automatic configuration saving
• Configuration screen through Mod Menu
• Fully client-side
• No server installation required

Shield States

Ready

The shield is available and can be used.

Activation Delay

When a player raises a shield, Minecraft applies a 5-tick activation delay before the shield starts blocking damage.

During this delay, Sentinel Shield:

• keeps the shield visibly raised,
• applies the configured delay color,
• indicates that shield use has started,
• indicates that the shield is not yet actively blocking.

Active

After the 5-tick activation delay, the shield enters the active blocking state.

The active state uses the configured ready color.

Cooldown

When a shield is disabled by an axe, Sentinel Shield displays the configured cooldown color.

For other players, shield cooldown information is predicted locally because Minecraft does not fully synchronize remote item cooldowns to every client.

Remote Shield Animation Fix

Minecraft may sometimes fail to display the shield-use animation for another player, even though that player is currently using a shield.

Sentinel Shield reconstructs the missing client-side shield-use state and restores the raised shield animation.

Unlike implementations that hide the shield during its activation delay, Sentinel Shield keeps the shield visible and uses the delay color to show that it has not started blocking yet.

This provides immediate visual feedback while preserving the 5-tick shield activation mechanic.

Configuration

The settings screen allows you to configure:

• whether Sentinel Shield is enabled,
• smooth cooldown color transitions,
• ready and active shield color,
• activation delay color,
• cooldown color,
• visual strength of every color.

The main Enabled switch disables all Sentinel Shield features, including:

• shield colors,
• remote shield animation correction,
• remote shield cooldown prediction.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.11
• Fabric Loader
• Fabric API
• Nythral Library
• Java 21

Mod Menu is optional.

Client Side

Sentinel Shield is entirely client-side.

It does not need to be installed on the server and does not add blocks, items, entities, recipes, or server-side mechanics.

License

MIT