Mecha Vanguard

Seven pilotable machines, from a seven-block walker to a seventeen-block titan.

Mine titanium, alloy it, raise an assembly bay, and build something that walks. Mecha Vanguard is a progression mod: every machine is four crafted sections and a power grid away, and nothing about it is a creative-mode toy — a titan costs an expedition's worth of work and drinks energy the whole time you are in it.

Getting started

The game explains itself. You are handed the Vanguard Field Manual the first time you join a world — thirty-three illustrated pages in English and Spanish, followed by a recipe index read straight out of the game's own recipe manager, so it cannot drift from what your pack actually crafts.

The short version:

1. Titanium ore generates through the overworld between Y -48 and Y 40, in stone and in deepslate. Iron pickaxe or better.
2. Smelt it, press it into plates, and build an alloy furnace — two inputs and a fuel — to make vanguard alloy.
3. Craft the four sections: chassis, legs, arms, cockpit. The chassis decides which machine you get. The other three are shared, and each can be refined at an upgrade bench for more hull, speed and armour.
4. Craft the pilot suit. All four pieces, carried — not necessarily worn. No suit, no cockpit.
5. Raise the assembly bay and put the machine together.

The machines

The titans stand seventeen blocks to the top of the conn-pod, carry two crew and four times a walker's cargo, and drink four times as hard — which is what stops them being a strict upgrade to everything else.

Piloting

Every one of those is a real key mapping and shows up in the vanilla Controls screen, so you can move any of them.

What is in it

• Animation, not reskins. Every machine has its own walk, run, sprint, jump, kneel, flight and collapse, built for its own skeleton — the digitigrade artillery walker does not walk like the humanoid.
• Energy. Coal generators, solar panels, battery banks that level their charge against each other, cables, and charging pads. Forge Energy throughout, so anything else that speaks FE can feed it.
• A chain sword with a combination. Three blows: a cut, a backhand, and the blade into the ground — the third hits more than twice as hard, reaches further, throws what it catches upward, and costs three times the recovery.
• Two crew. A titan's second seat is a gunner, with their own line of sight and their own trigger, and a control panel that decides who may sit there.
• Modules. Speed, armour, jetpack, night vision, capacity, and thrusters — the last one turns a titan's dead nacelles into working ones, and then it flies on the same double-tap as creative flight.
• Ruins to find. Wrecked hangars roughly every 1,500 blocks with a bay core to repair, and derelict titans roughly every 5,000 with the shards you need to build one of your own. Nothing in the mod points you at them.