A vanilla boat holds two people, and one of them is usually a chicken. Bullets Boats lets you make the boat bigger. Put one in a crafting grid, pack planks around it, and it comes out one section wider or one section longer. Do it again and it grows again. There is no cap written into the recipe, so the raft gets as large as your patience and your plank supply. It also adds a boat that catches fish while you row it, and a boat made mostly of obsidian that floats on lava.
Growing a boat is a strangely calm loop: craft, place, sail, come back, add another section. Then you get four friends onto one hull and it becomes something else: someone has the helm, someone is sitting at the back arguing about it, and pressing J or K walks you a seat forward or back along the deck like a real crew shuffling around. The Lava Boat is the opposite feeling. It sits just proud of the surface, smoking gently, and you are moving across a lava lake using ordinary boat controls in a place that has always killed you.
👥 Playing with friends
Big boats are for crews: everyone boards, and two keys walk you up and down the deck.
⚠️ Before you install
A wide, long hull is one boat plus one entity per extra section. Very large boats are a lot of entities moving together, and that has a cost on a busy server.
Extending a boat overwrites its wood type with the wood of the planks you used, so a spruce boat crafted with oak planks comes out oak.
Each loader and version combination is its own codebase. A fix in one does not automatically reach the others.
⏱️ Your first 5 minutes
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
Craft an ordinary vanilla boat out of any wood.
Put it in the centre of a 3x3 crafting grid and fill all eight remaining slots with planks of one type, and you get a boat one section wider and one section longer.
Place it on water, then right-click while looking at the spot you want: the click takes the free seat nearest your crosshair.
Sneak and right-click instead to board strictly as a passenger, never taking the helm.
While seated, press J and K to step one seat toward the bow or the stern, and R to cycle.
Craft a fishing rod directly above a boat to get a Fish Boat, then row it around and watch your inventory.
🔁 How it works
Boats grow on the crafting grid
Three plank patterns around a boat do three different things. Eight planks completely surrounding it adds one to both width and length. A U of five planks, laid under the boat and up both sides, adds one to length. The same five planks turned on their side, a C opening left or right, adds one to width. Feed the result back in and it grows again, from either a vanilla boat or one you have already extended.
Tip: Mixed plank types are refused outright, and the planks you use set the wood the finished boat is made of.
The tooltip tells you how big it is
An extended boat item carries its dimensions and its wood, and shows them in the tooltip as Width and Length in sections. That matters because every boat variant in the mod is called 'Large Boat' regardless of how large it actually got, so the tooltip is the only way to tell a two-section raft from a twelve-section one before you place it.
Seats, and who is steering
Seat zero is the helm, and whoever holds it is the boat's controlling passenger. A boat whose helm is empty is a perfectly valid state; it just drifts. Right-clicking the hull puts you in the free seat nearest to where you are aiming; sneak-right-clicking takes a passenger seat and never the helm, so you cannot accidentally steal the wheel from a friend.
Tip: Stepping backwards out of seat zero is a legitimate way to hand over the helm mid-voyage.
Walking around the deck
Three keys, all rebindable: R cycles you one seat onward, J steps one seat toward the bow, K one seat toward the stern. The client only sends a request; the server re-validates every move and clamps anything impossible, so a step forward from the helm is simply a no-op.
Tip: J and K are unbound in vanilla on every version this mod ships for. Q and E were already drop and inventory.
The hull is made of many entities
The head boat is a real boat; every extra section is a separate entity riding it, positioned each tick from the head boat's rotation. Clicking any section boards you as if you had clicked the boat itself, since each part forwards the interaction on with its own stable index.
The Fish Boat
Crafted from a fishing rod above any boat. While a player is actually piloting it, in water, and the boat has moved to a new block position, there is roughly a one-in-a-hundred chance per tick that a fish lands in your inventory: about half cod, three in ten salmon, three in twenty tropical fish, and one in twenty pufferfish. If your inventory is full it drops the fish at your feet rather than deleting it.
Tip: It has to be moving and it has to be you at the helm. A parked Fish Boat catches nothing.
The Lava Boat
Crafted from a boat and five obsidian. Its entire in-game tooltip is 'Sails on lava. Fireproof.' It floats on lava using vanilla's own buoyancy, friction and steering, rides just above the surface, and puffs smoke and the occasional lava pop off the edge of the hull while it is on lava.
Tip: Water still behaves exactly as vanilla intends, and nothing about ordinary boats is changed.
Every loader, most versions
The mod is maintained across a full matrix of loader and Minecraft version: Fabric and Forge from 1.19.2 onwards, and NeoForge from 1.20.1 onwards, up through 26.1 and 26.2. Each combination is a separate codebase on its own branch, because porting across Minecraft's 1.20.5 and 1.21 API breaks is manual work no matter how it is organised.
🎒 Items & blocks
Large Boat
The extendable boat. Carries its width, length and wood type on the item, and shows all three in its tooltip.
Where: Surround any boat with planks in a crafting grid. Feed the result back in to grow it again.
Large Spruce Boat
The spruce version. The wood is decided by the planks you crafted it with, not by the boat you started from.
Where: Craft the upgrade with spruce planks.
Large Birch Boat
The birch version, palest of the set.
Where: Craft the upgrade with birch planks.
Large Jungle Boat
The jungle version.
Where: Craft the upgrade with jungle planks.
Large Acacia Boat
The acacia version, orange enough to spot from shore.
Where: Craft the upgrade with acacia planks.
Large Dark Oak Boat
The dark oak version.
Where: Craft the upgrade with dark oak planks.
Large Mangrove Boat
The mangrove version.
Where: Craft the upgrade with mangrove planks.
Fish Boat
A boat with a rod lashed to it. Rowing it around in water occasionally lands a fish straight in your inventory.
Where: A fishing rod directly above any boat, in a crafting grid.
Lava Boat
Floats on lava and is fireproof. Its whole tooltip is two sentences long.
Where: A boat with five obsidian around it: three below, one either side.
Extended hull section
Each section past the first is its own entity riding the head boat, drawn with this planking. Clicking one boards you as though you had clicked the boat.
Where: Appears automatically for every section you add.
Fish Boat, afloat
How the Fish Boat looks once it is on the water.
Where: Place a Fish Boat.
The rod rigging
The rod itself is drawn as a separate layer over the Fish Boat's hull.
Where: Comes with every Fish Boat.
Lava Boat, afloat
The obsidian hull, riding just above the lava surface with smoke coming off the edge.
Where: Place a Lava Boat on lava.
🖼️ Texture gallery
Every texture this mod ships, at its real in-game size, scaled up so you can see each
pixel. Most are 16×16, the same size as a vanilla dirt block.
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
Some infinitely long
The mod's own one-line description, written by its authors, reads: 'This is a mod that adds boats, some smaller some larger. Some infinitely long.' It is not marketing. The upgrade recipe genuinely has no upper limit in it. Every craft adds one more section in one direction, and it will keep accepting the result forever.
Taking the helm
Seat zero is the wheel. Everything else on the deck is a passenger, and the boat is perfectly happy to sit there pilotless and drift if nobody is holding it. Boarding normally puts you wherever you were looking; boarding while sneaking promises the crew you are not going to touch the steering.
🎁 Jokes & trivia
Bits you might miss
Every extended boat in the game is called 'Large Boat', including the one that is nine sections long. The tooltip is the only thing that will tell you which is which.
The Lava Boat's entire in-game description is: 'Sails on lava. Fireproof.'
Roughly one Fish Boat catch in twenty is a pufferfish. It is a fishing mod that can punish you for fishing.
One of the boat-size setter methods takes a parameter named after one of the author's friends rather than anything to do with boats.
The mod's own description promises boats that are 'infinitely long' and then declines to add a size cap, which makes it technically accurate.
The Fish Boat only pays out while it is moving, so the most efficient fishing spot in the mod is 'anywhere, as long as you never stop'.
From the workshop
The mod is maintained on 29 branches (one per loader and Minecraft version), all orphan branches with completely independent histories, because porting across the 1.20.5 and 1.21 API breaks is manual work regardless of how the repository is arranged.
The project folders named 'BulletsBoatsJava' are Forge builds, confirmed by their metadata files. 'Java' is not a mod loader, and the branch names were corrected accordingly.
Extra hull sections used to silently vanish whenever you sailed away from spawn. They were being created at coordinates 0,0,0, inside an unloaded chunk, so they never joined the entity tick list, and the server force-dismounted them for not ticking.
The Fish Boat used to run its fishing roll on the client as well as the server, which created ghost fish that overwrote items in your hotbar on the next sync.
Fabric has no equivalent of NeoForge's 'can this boat be in this fluid' hook, so the Fabric lava boat instead redirects every water check inside vanilla's boat code to also accept lava. That reuses all of vanilla's buoyancy, friction and steering for free, and it leaves water untouched.
The Lava Boat rides slightly above the surface for a rendering reason: lava is drawn before entities are, so a hull floating at normal depth has the lava surface drawn straight through its deck.
❓ FAQ
How big can a boat actually get?
The recipe has no cap written into it. Each craft adds one section in one direction, so the limit is your patience, your planks and how many entities you want floating in one place.
Do vanilla boats still work?
Yes, and you need one: a plain vanilla boat is the starting ingredient for every upgrade.
Which versions and loaders can I get it for?
Fabric and Forge from 1.19.2 through 26.2, and NeoForge from 1.20.1 through 26.2. NeoForge has no 1.19.2 build because NeoForge did not exist yet.
Does everyone on a server need it installed?
Yes. The boats are new entities with their own rendering and their own keybinds, so both the server and every client want the mod.
Why isn't my Fish Boat catching anything?
It only fishes while a player is at the helm, the boat is in water, and it is actually moving to new blocks. A moored Fish Boat is just a boat.
What about cherry and bamboo boats?
Those wood types do not exist before 1.20, so the 1.19.2 builds do not have them. Which woods are available follows whatever the Minecraft version itself supports.
⚒ Crafting recipes
Fish BoatLava Boat
⬇️ Get it
Status: Published or running on a live server. Safe to try.
Install NeoForge, Forge, Fabric for Minecraft 1.19.2, 1.20.1, 1.20.4, 1.20.6, 1.21.1, 1.21.4, 1.21.8, 1.21.11, 26.1, 26.2. The
install guide walks through this assuming no prior knowledge.
Drop the mod's .jar file into your mods folder.
Everyone on the server needs it.
Launch the game with that loader's profile selected.
📦 Where is the file?
This wiki documents the mods; it does
not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under
mc-bullets-boats/build/libs/.
By Bulletpies and CreepSkeet. Licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
