Coat your blade. Lace their bread.
Envenom adds two ways to deliver a potion's effects without throwing the potion: coating a melee weapon, and lacing food. Both run off ordinary brewed potions, so your existing brewing stand is the front end for the whole kit — no new blocks, no new ores, no new dimension.
String String -> 2x Cloth
String String
Plain Cloth is the blank a brew soaks into — and the rag you wipe a blade down with later.
Potion of Poison + 4x Cloth -> 4x Poison Coating Cloth
Any brewed potion works. No lingering potion, no dragon's breath, no trip to the End. The recipe is shapeless, and coating cloths stack, so you prepare a satchel before a job rather than brewing mid-fight.
Coating Cloth + Iron Sword -> Poison-Coated Iron Sword
You get your own weapon back — same durability, same enchantments, same anvil name — now carrying the coating. Coating an already-coated weapon renews it and resets the wear.
The target catches the potion's effects at ⅛ duration, the exact math vanilla uses for tipped arrows. A successful hit bursts potion-coloured particles and hisses; a failed one is just an ordinary hit.
Poison-Coated Iron Sword
Poison (0:05)
Coating: 62% ▓▓▓▓▓░░░
A coating is not spent in one hit — it wears. A fresh coat lands every time; a thinning one starts failing, more and more often, until it flakes off and the weapon is ordinary again.
| landed hits | chance the effect fails |
|---|---|
| 0 | 0% |
| 4 | 25% |
| 8 | 60% |
| 12 | coating falls off |
Roughly seven effects delivered per cloth, or about 28 from a single potion once it's been split four ways.
Plain Cloth + Coated Weapon -> the weapon, clean
Name, tint and tooltip all revert. Durability and enchantments untouched.
Put a potion in the crafting grid with some food. The dose splits evenly between the portions.
Potion of Poison (0:45) + 5x Bread -> 5x Bread, 0:09 each
What comes out is ordinary food. Same name, same texture, same tooltip. Nothing marks it out — except to you. The food remembers who laced it, and only that player sees a discreet "Laced by your hand" line. The victim gets no warning, and neither does anyone else who picks it up.
It pays out when the food is actually swallowed, so a victim interrupted mid-bite gets away with it.
Swords, axes, spears, maces and tridents. Bows and crossbows are excluded on purpose — vanilla tipped arrows already own that niche.
Coatings apply to melee hits only:
Server-side, synced to clients so the tooltip always agrees with the server.
| option | default | meaning |
|---|---|---|
maxHits |
12 | landed hits before a coat is spent |
wearCurve |
1.25 | shape of the reliability curve; higher keeps early hits safer |
durationScale |
0.125 | fraction of the potion's duration transferred |
affectPlayers |
true | whether coatings apply in PvP |
maxHits is stamped onto the weapon when it's coated, so retuning the config never silently
rebalances coatings that already exist in your world.
Yes — go ahead, no need to ask. Envenom is MIT licensed. Public packs, private packs, servers, paid-hosting packs, all fine. A credit link is appreciated but not required.
Yes. The mod adds items, recipes and data components, so client and server both need it. Joining a server that has it without having it installed will not work.
NeoForge, Minecraft 26.2. There's no Fabric or Forge build.
Yes. Coatable weapons are driven by the item tag envenom:coatable, which ships containing
#minecraft:swords, #minecraft:axes, #minecraft:spears, minecraft:mace and
minecraft:trident. Any modded weapon on those vanilla tags works with no extra setup, and a
datapack can add more with no code.
Modded weapons get the full mechanics but keep their own appearance — the potion-coloured overlay only ships for vanilla weapons, since each overlay is hand-fitted to a specific silhouette.
No — laced food only affects players. Villagers eat through a completely different code path that never triggers the "finished eating" hook, so poisoned bread handed to a villager does nothing. This is a genuine limitation rather than a bug, and it means the lacing half of the mod is effectively multiplayer content.
Minecraft decides stacking by item components, and laced food carries an extra one. This is kept on purpose. A completely undetectable poison is a mechanic with no counterplay — a player who notices their stacks refusing to merge has earned the right to be suspicious. It's the only defence the system offers, so it stays.
The hiding is presentation only. The component syncs to every client, so F3+H advanced tooltips will reveal that the item carries something extra, and a modified client could show it outright. If you're running a server where that matters, know it up front.
Instantaneous effects — Harming, Healing — ignore duration entirely, so splitting one across eight loaves produces eight full-strength doses rather than eight weak ones. That's deliberate: it makes instant potions the expensive, lethal option rather than the useless one.
Weaving cloth and steeping it appear in the recipe book normally. Coating, cleaning and lacing cannot — their output is your weapon or your food rather than a fixed item, which Minecraft's recipe book has no way to display. Those three are taught by an advancement chain instead, each one describing the craft.
They work, but they don't show the overlay. Their item models use a special in-hand renderer, and compositing over it would flatten a held trident into a flat sprite. Mechanics over cosmetics.
Adding is safe. Removing will leave coated weapons and laced food carrying unknown components — wipe coatings off with a plain cloth and eat or discard laced food before uninstalling.
This mod is developed at my convenience, and may be updated to newer versions of Minecraft once existing versions become outdated.
