Axecellent

Chop the base of a tree and watch it come apart — branch tips first, working back to the block in your hand.

Which tool can do it — and how the tree falls when it does — is decided by item tags, not an enchantment. They ship empty, so a pack grants the chainsaw to whichever tools it likes, and can make the way a tree comes down something a player upgrades into.

Minecraft 1.21.1 · NeoForge

What it does

Break a log with a chainsaw tool and the whole connected tree comes down — but not in a blink. The cut starts at the log furthest away through the tree’s own branches, works back along them, and finishes on the very block you hit. Each log takes its leaves with it, so the canopy dissolves along with the branch holding it up.

That progression is the point. Most tree-fellers make a tree vanish; this one lets you watch it fall, and gives you a mode where you drive it.

On its own it does nothing. No tool has the chainsaw until it is granted — see Granting the chainsaw. The mod is the mechanism; the pack decides which tool gets it.

Cut modes

PROGRESSIVE

One break brings the whole tree down over the next moment or two, a couple of logs per tick. A big spruce takes a few seconds; a birch is over almost at once.

HELD

The tree only comes apart while you keep chopping. Every chop you finish takes one more log — and between chops, nothing happens at all. Stop swinging and the tree stops falling, right where it is. Your tool sets the rhythm: a stone axe grinds through, a netherite axe tears.

Crouch to reverse it. Normally the far end goes first and the cut travels toward you; crouched, logs peel away from your own block instead — so a single chop takes just the log in front of you, and carrying on eats into the tree from there. Precise control when you want it, spectacle when you don't.

Durability is charged per block as it falls, so stopping early only costs what you cut.

INSTANT

The whole tree disappears in the same tick. For servers that would rather not have the flourish, or packs automating tree farms.

Picking one

A mode is a property of the tool. Put a tool in #axecellent:chainsaw_held, #axecellent:chainsaw_progressive or #axecellent:chainsaw_instant and it always cuts that way; put it in the plain #axecellent:chainsaw and it follows the chainsaw.mode setting.

That is what lets all three coexist in one pack. A wooden axe that makes you chop for every log, an iron axe that fells a tree in one swing, a netherite axe that does it before you have let go of the button — the same tree, three different feelings, as a progression rather than a server-wide switch nobody sees.

PROGRESSIVE and HELD each have a config section for their own pacing — see Configuration.

Requirements

Everything happens server-side, so clients do not need the mod. A client that does have it names the ability on the tooltip of any tool carrying a chainsaw tag — Pull-Start Chainsaw, Power Chainsaw, Turbo Chainsaw — so players can tell which tool is the special one, and which flavour of it they have got. The wording is yours to change.

Installing

1. Install NeoForge for 1.21.1.
2. Drop the jar into mods/.
3. On a multiplayer server, the server needs it. Clients do not.
4. Grant the chainsaw to a tool — nothing happens until you do.

Granting the chainsaw

Axecellent asks one question of an item: which of its four tool tags is it in? How it got there is up to you. Anything that can add to an item tag works — a datapack, KubeJS, another mod, a pack-generation script.

A mode tag is enough on its own — a tool in one of them does not also need the plain tag. Two common ways to fill them in:

A KubeJS server script

In kubejs/server_scripts/, applied with /reload:

ServerEvents.tags('item', event => {
    event.add('axecellent:chainsaw', 'minecraft:iron_axe')
    event.add('axecellent:chainsaw_held', 'minecraft:wooden_axe')
    event.add('axecellent:chainsaw_instant', 'minecraft:netherite_axe')
})

A datapack

At data/axecellent/tags/item/chainsaw.json (or chainsaw_held.json, and so on):

{
  "values": [
    "minecraft:iron_axe"
  ]
}

Check it took with /kubejs list-tag item axecellent:chainsaw, or simply look at the tool's tooltip. In plain vanilla, /clear @s #axecellent:chainsaw 0 counts matching items without removing anything.

Three things that catch people out

• Tags apply to the item type, not one stack. Tagging minecraft:iron_axe gives the chainsaw to every iron axe, not one particular one.
• Do not put a tool in two mode tags. If it happens anyway the most hands-on mode wins — held, then progressive, then instant — but that is a tie-break, not something to rely on.
• Removing an entry only works if it was added as an entry. If something is in the tag through a nested tag reference — say another pack added #minecraft:axes — you have to remove the reference, not the item: event.remove('axecellent:chainsaw', '#minecraft:axes'). Removing minecraft:wooden_axe in that situation fails silently.

What counts as a tree

Two block tags, and unlike the tool tags these do have defaults, so modded trees generally work with no configuration at all.

#minecraft:logs also covers crimson and warped stems, so nether "trees" are cut too. Drop them from axecellent:chainsaw_logs if you would rather they were not.

Only naturally grown leaves are ever cleared. Leaves a player placed are persistent and always survive, which is what keeps an uncapped leaf sweep safe around builds.

Renaming the tooltip

The tooltip line is a translation key, not baked-in text, so a pack can word it however it likes — including in another language, or as nothing at all. Override these four keys in a resource pack at assets/axecellent/lang/en_us.json:

They are names rather than descriptions, and they climb: a pull-start you keep yanking, then power, then turbo. So a player who upgrades their axe sees the ability upgrade with it, the way the enchantment this replaces would have. PROGRESSIVE and HELD never appear — those are config values, and a player has no reason to know them.

There is a ready-made pack in examples/resourcepack/ — drop it in resourcepacks/, or merge the lang file into a pack you already ship. Set a key to "" to drop that line entirely.

The tooltip is client-side, so this is a resource pack rather than a server setting: it changes what your players see, and a client without the pack still reads the shipped wording. The grey styling and the position (last line) are the mod's; the words are yours.

Configuration

config/axecellent-server.toml. It is a server config, so in multiplayer the server's copy decides and clients need nothing.

A setting sits in a mode's section only when it belongs to that mode. Everything that means the same thing whichever way the tree falls is global — one maxLogs, one durability price.

Then each mode has its own section for the settings that only make sense there — how it is paced, and what crouching does:

INSTANT has no section of its own: having nothing to pace is what makes it instant.

If your tool runs out of durability partway through a tree, the cut stops and the rest stays standing.

Changing settings in game

Requires op. Changes are written to the config file immediately, so they survive a restart.

/axecellent config                       list every option and its value
/axecellent config <option>              show one: value, default, range, description
/axecellent config <option> <value>      change it
/axecellent config reset                 put everything back to defaults

Option names are the dotted paths from the file, for example /axecellent config held.logsPerChop 2. Values outside an option's range are rejected before anything is written, and anything differing from its default is highlighted. Changes apply to cuts already in progress, so a setting can be tuned while watching one.

For pack makers

Put your settings in defaultconfigs/axecellent-server.toml. Two things worth knowing:

• List only the keys you want to change. Anything left out is filled in from the mod's own defaults, comments and all, so your file stays short and does not go stale when a new option is added.
• It seeds a fresh install only. NeoForge copies it into config/ when that file is absent, so on its own it will not push changed values to a server that has already run. To make a pack update land, your updater has to replace config/axecellent-server.toml.

Multiplayer

Cutting is server-authoritative, and each removed block goes through the same path an ordinary player break would — including a block-break event per block, so land claim and protection mods can veto them individually.

Only one chainsaw cut runs on a tree at a time. If somebody else is already cutting the tree you swing at, your break is an ordinary one and their cut carries on undisturbed.

AI disclosure

I use the best tools available to me, and that includes an AI coding assistant. What I do not do is stand back and let it produce slop. Every line is read, checked and play-tested by me before it ships.

I am a professional programmer. I have run plenty of public Minecraft servers, I understand how Minecraft actually works, and I wrote mods before any of this existed. The assistant does not decide what a mod is, how it should behave, or what stays out of scope, those are mine. What it does is raise the standard of the work around them: the documentation gets written properly, the awkward cases get covered, and nothing ships half-finished.

If something here is broken, it is mine to fix. Open an issue and I will.

Licence

MIT.