Modes

A mode is two decisions at once: the kit the bot carries and the combat model it fights under. Picking CRYSTAL_PVP puts netherite and blast protection on it and gives it obsidian, crystals, anchors and pearls; picking SWORD puts it back in diamond and takes every consumable away. That is why bot.mode and bot.difficulty are the only two keys in config.yml anybody has to understand — the mode decides which techniques exist, and difficulty decides how well they are executed.

bot:
  mode: POT_PVP
  difficulty: NORMAL

The seven modes

Only three modes have a block of their own. advanced.attack, advanced.movement, advanced.health and advanced.defense apply to every mode alike — see configuration.

The kit each mode dresses in

A fresh bot starts on the kit of its mode, so nobody has to know that crystal PvP wants blast protection and a totem while pot PvP wants Strength II. After that the gear is the player's: switching mode changes the techniques, never the kit. The kit below is written onto the settings when they are first built — a player's first bot, and again after /bot reset — and when a bot is spawned through the API. Cycling the mode in the menu after that changes the techniques and the combat model and leaves the gear exactly as you set it. Armour is uniform, four pieces of the same tier with the same enchantment; mixing tiers afterwards is a per-piece choice in the equipment menu.

UHC carries no potion buffs on purpose: in UHC what you drink is what you brewed, and the bot brews nothing. Boxing carries no armour and nothing in the off hand because nobody is taking damage — armour would be scenery and a shield would be a way to stop the round happening.

The combat model

Every shipped mode fights under the modern rules: the attack bar exists, damage scales with it, and a critical hit is a deliberate jump paid for with the sprint. What differs per mode is how much each of those is worth.

Reach factor multiplies the distance the bot likes to hold, so a crystal bot stands roughly half as far out as a sword bot. Orbit bias multiplies how often it circles instead of walking straight in: above one is a format decided by movement, below one a format decided by pressure. "Stays grounded" is crystal PvP only — a blast under your feet hurts far more from above it, so the crit jump and the jump reset are taken away.

Weapons keep their vanilla cadence: a sword charges in 12.5 ticks, an axe in 20, a mace in 33.3. advanced.attack.speed-multiplier multiplies whichever the mode chose.

NONE — sandbox

The zero value. Same kit as SWORD, no style of its own, and a high crit chance — 0.75, second only to pot PvP — because nothing in it argues against jumping. The API's CombatMode.playable() leaves it out of any list built for a player to choose from, but the in-game menu cycles through all seven, so it is reachable there. It is mostly what an unparseable name falls back to, and a plain dummy for a server that wants one.

SWORD — movement

There is no consumable and no gimmick, so there is nothing for a style to own: the crits it hardly takes and the strafing it lives on belong to the brain, and every bot gets them. Which makes SWORD the honest read on difficulty — aim, reaction, spacing, sprint resets and cooldown discipline with nothing on top.

The crit is deliberately rare here. Nine ticks of stalling and a dropped sprint buy one hit and a half, and cost the strafe the format is actually won with, so the bot circles more than in any other mode and jumps in almost none of them.

POT_PVP — the resource game

The techniques that decide a pot fight are already in the brain. What the style owns is the resource game, and that is what separates a good pot player from a bad one.

• Splash first, eat second. Instant Health II lands at the bot's own feet and costs it a tick and no ground, so it is the heal the fight is played with. The golden apple is thirty-two ticks of standing still for a payout that arrives afterwards, and it is only started from a position that survives thirty-two ticks.
• Heal on your terms. The apple — and only the apple — is worth backing out of reach for, shield up, eaten there. A low-patience bot will start eating in the middle of a combo, which is exactly the mistake that loses the round.
• Punish the heal. The moment the opponent raises a hand to eat, the bot commits.
• Double pot. Below four hearts one splash was never going to be enough, so the second follows three or four ticks later rather than after the health bar is read again.

advanced:
  pot-pvp:
    apple-percent: 35.0
    potion-percent: 70.0
    enchanted-apples: false

Both percentages are the centre of a threshold, not the threshold: each bot rolls its own bias once and keeps it — up to six points either side for the potion, eight for the apple. Two bots on the same difficulty that both reach for a potion at exactly the same health are two copies of one script; two that reach at 64 % and 76 % are two players.

A bot spawned with no kit carries 18 splash potions and 8 golden apples, and restocks after seven seconds with no hit landed either way — the way somebody walks back to their chest between rounds.

UHC — deciding where the fight happens

UHC is the format with no brewing stand: there is one heal, it takes thirty-two ticks of standing still, and everything else in the kit is a way of deciding where the fight happens.

• The guard break is the read. An axe swing puts a raised shield on cooldown, and the bot does it on every swing it lands with an axe in hand. A bot whose main hand was changed in the menu still knows the technique: it brings an axe out for one swing and puts it away.
• The web is a combo, not a trap. It goes at their feet only inside 4.5 blocks, because a webbed opponent one block away is four free hits and a webbed opponent six blocks away is four free seconds to eat.
• The lava is a wall. Dumped at their feet from 2.6 to 6.5 blocks out, and only against somebody already below 55 % health — at full health a burn is four hearts and a reason to eat. It is placed without a block update, so the source never flows anywhere, and it is picked back up two seconds later.
• The water is the other half of the lava. On fire or standing in it, the bot puts itself out with a bucket at its own feet rather than burning to death next to its own trap.

advanced:
  uhc:
    apple-percent: 60.0
    cobweb: true
    lava: true
    water: true

Everything the bot puts down is taken back up: a cobweb after three seconds, lava after two, water after one, and all of it immediately when the bot is removed. A bot spawned with no kit carries 6 apples, 4 cobwebs, 2 lava buckets and 2 water buckets, and restocks after seven quiet seconds.

CRYSTAL_PVP — a rehearsed sequence

Crystal PvP is not a chance to place a crystal every tick, it is a rehearsed sequence, so the bot runs a state machine and the difficulty only decides how fast the machine runs:

IDLE   pick a spot beside the opponent and inside your own reach
PREP   face it, sneak, lay obsidian - a crystal goes on nothing else
ARM    set the crystal down
POP    shield up, swing at it, take your share of the blast
DTAP   second crystal into the knockback, past the invulnerability window
RESET  sword back in hand, breathe

What makes it read as a crystal player rather than as a script:

• It never leaves the floor. The crit jump and the jump reset — free value everywhere else — are how a crystal player kills themselves, so this mode takes them away.
• It closes, it never kites. The style never asks to retreat and never stops to eat. The health bar is defended with totems and with the opponent being dead.
• It makes the height it needs. Swing first; the hit lifts the opponent off the floor for a moment; obsidian goes into the block they just vacated; they land on top of it a block higher and the next crystal sits below them, which is where a crystal does its damage.
• Height decides the weapon. Against somebody on flat ground the obsidian under a crystal is between them and the blast, so the bot reaches for the anchor instead: it takes the floor out, and the crater it leaves is where the next crystal goes.
• It answers your crystals. An armed crystal within reach is somebody else's damage on a timer, so the bot raises its shield and sets it off itself before you can.
• It builds defensively. Two blasts from underneath in quick succession and it fills the block the blast came out of, or puts one block of obsidian on the line between itself and the hole.
• Its own blast hurts it. The explosion does not exclude the bot, so placement scoring and the self-preservation floor are decisions with a real price.

advanced:
  crystal-pvp:
    range: 5.0
    self-preservation-percent: 30.0
    anchor: true
    trap: true
    ender-pearls: true
    break-blocks: true

MACE_PVP — height is the damage

The mace is worth nothing on the ground and everything at the end of a fall, so the whole mode is one loop: get height, stay over the target, land the smash. The damage scaling is vanilla, which means height really is what makes the hit hurt — the bot is not being handed a big number.

• The wind charge goes whenever the range is there. It is cheap, it comes back in under two seconds, and a mace on the ground is a slow sword. The launch needs line of sight and 5.5 blocks or less.
• The pearl is saved. A pearl lift puts the bot twelve blocks up against the charge's seven, and costs most of a second of standing still before its feet leave the floor — so it waits for somebody already committed: eating, looking away, or under 45 % health.
• It plants its feet first. A short pause before the charge goes off under it. A launch nobody can read is not practice.
• No two launches are the same height, so the fall — and the damage at the end of it — varies the way a real one does.
• A smash into a raised shield is a smash wasted, so the axe goes first and the launch waits for the wind-up it costs.

MACE_PVP has no advanced block of its own: everything about it is the loop above, the global advanced.attack and advanced.movement, and the difficulty.

BOXING — hits, not damage

Nobody takes damage. Every hit still lands with its own knockback, its own invulnerability window and its own sound — only the damage is gone, so a round is a hundred exchanges long instead of six and a dropped combo costs a count rather than the round. The bot's own health bar is scenery too: whatever you did to it is undone every tick, and fire is put out, so the round ends when somebody walks away and not before.

bot:
  boxing-score: '{secondary}Boxing {letters_black}▎ {letters}You {success}%player_hits% {letters_black}▎ {letters}Bot {error}%bot_hits%'

The bot spends the entire round pressuring — no healing, no spacing, no shield, no crit, because none of them would do anything. It circles more than any mode but SWORD.

A bot fights with the kit it is given

This is the limitation that surprises people. A mode's tactics are gated on the bot actually having the items for them, and where those items come from depends on how the bot was spawned.

The kit also decides the gear, which is why the kit table above only applies to a bot dressed by its mode. Given a kit, the bot wears it as it came — its enchantments, its durability, its names — and works out for itself which item to hold: a mace over an axe over a sword over a trident, better tier breaking a tie, judged by what wins a fight rather than by hotbar order. A shield or a totem in the kit's off hand is read as a shield or a totem; anything else in that slot is worth nothing to the AI. A kit with no weapon is a bot that punches, and that is not a reason to refuse a fight.

Pot PvP and UHC restock between rounds — seven seconds with no hit either way and the ledger goes back to what the kit started as.

Names and one-line summaries

What players read for each mode is messages.yml, not the enum:

placeholders:
  mode:
    none: '{muted}Vanilla'
    sword: '{letters}Sword'
    pot-pvp: '{success}Pot PvP'
    uhc: '{warning}UHC'
    crystal-pvp: '{info}Crystal PvP'
    mace-pvp: '{error}Mace PvP'
    boxing: '{accent}Boxing'
    none-summary: 'Sword and shield. No consumables, no tricks.'
    sword-summary: 'Pure movement: strafes, w-taps, combos, almost no crits.'
    pot-pvp-summary: 'Crits, w-taps, combos, gapples and heal pots.'
    uhc-summary: 'Axe and shield: guard breaks, gapples, cobweb, lava and water.'
    crystal-pvp-summary: 'Obsidian, crystals, double taps, anchors and traps.'
    mace-pvp-summary: 'Wind charge launches into mace smashes.'
    boxing-summary: 'Nobody takes damage. Hits are counted instead.'

Changing a mode from the menu confirms with the bot.mode-changed message, which carries %mode%.

bot:
  mode-changed: '%prefix% {letters}Mode set to %mode% {letters_black}» {letters}techniques only.'