Diving Bell

🔔 What it is

A winch on your dock lowers a copper diving bell straight down into the sea, one block every two seconds, as deep as the chain you loaded will pay out. The bell is open at the bottom: swim up through the grate and you are standing in air at the bottom of the ocean. There is no air meter and no timer. The bell holds about three minutes of air, and as you spend it the water inside visibly rises, up your legs, your chest, your chin. That rising water line is the entire interface.

The descent is the best part: two seconds a block, chain clanking overhead, a shipwreck sliding past the porthole, and then the soft thud of the grate settling on the sand. You step out, dig into the wreck, stuff the chest's contents into your shirt, and swim back to the warm lantern glow, and the water inside is at your knees now, which it was not before. Nothing beeps. Nothing counts down. You just look at the line, do the arithmetic against how far the loot is, and decide whether you are brave or whether you are winching up. It is the cheapest way to breathe underwater in the game, and the least free.

⏱️ Your first 5 minutes

New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.

1. Craft a Winch Post from planks, iron and a chain, and place it at the edge of a dock, facing open water.
2. Right-click the post with chain. Each link buys two blocks of depth; sixteen links is the full reach.
3. Craft the Diving Bell from copper blocks, glass and a lantern, and hang it on the post.
4. Right-click the post. The bell drops into the water and sinks one block every two seconds until it finds the sea floor.
5. Swim down, get under the bell, and come up through the grate in its floor. You are now standing in air, at depth.
6. Watch the water line inside. When it is climbing your chest, it is time to be back in the bell and winching up.

🔁 How it works

🎒 Items & blocks

Diving Bell

The bell itself: a copper dome with a glass porthole, an open grate floor, a lantern hook and a locker, with standing room for one diver inside. Once hung on a winch it only ever moves by winching.

Where: Crafted from copper blocks, glass and a lantern, then hung on a Winch Post.

Winch Post

The crank on the dock that holds the chain and raises or lowers the bell, one right-click each way. It also remembers everything the bell displaced so it can put the ocean back.

Where: Crafted from planks, iron and a chain; place it on solid ground with water below or nearby.

Bellows

A hand pump that pushes air down the chain to the bell while a player holds right-click. It refills roughly what one diver breathes, does nothing unattended, and cannot be automated.

Where: Crafted, then placed next to the Winch Post.

Bell Locker

Nine slots in the bell's back wall, opened with a right-click, so shipwreck loot does not have to make the swim up in your pockets.

Where: Built into every bell; it is the far wall.

Bell Grate

The open floor of the bell. You stand on it, sneak to drop through it, and swim back up through it, and it is the only way in or out.

Where: Built into every bell; it is the bottom.

📜 Lore

Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.

🎁 Jokes & trivia

Bits you might miss

• Guardians and drowned cannot fit through the grate. Fish, axolotls and one sufficiently determined baby turtle can, and now it lives with you.
• When the water passes your head, the mod does nothing special whatsoever. You are simply underwater, like anyone else who ran out of ideas.
• The deep preset looks like a huge upgrade: five minutes of air, depth 48. Then the doubled pressure and the 192-second round trip eat almost all of it. Reach costs time, not safety.
• An empty bell parked on the sea floor still loses its air, specifically so you cannot leave yourself a cozy pre-stocked airlock down there.
• The Bellows runs on exactly one fuel: a friend who owes you a favour, standing on a dock, holding right-click, wondering how it came to this.
• Touching the bottom with every link paid out earns the advancement Twenty Thousand Leagues, which at depth 32 is off by roughly twenty thousand leagues.

From the workshop

• A unit test fails the whole build if any preset, at any depth it can reach, ever out-lasts a plain water breathing potion. The balance rule is enforced by the compiler, not the changelog.
• In verification, the bell descended through a kelp forest and back and all 387 displaced blocks were restored byte-for-byte identical, after a fix: the ocean has to be put back bottom-up, or the kelp dies on the way.
• The original open-bottomed design had no floor at all, which is period-accurate and unlivable; the grate block was added so divers had something to stand on.
• The mod survived two deliberate hard kills of the server mid-descent with zero orphaned blocks left in the ocean.
• The spec says an empty bell should not drain at all; it was built to drain anyway, because a literal reading allowed a free permanent airlock, and the brief said that when in doubt, make it weaker.

❓ FAQ

🖼️ Images

⚒ Crafting recipes

⬇️ Get it

Status: The jar compiles and the author has tested it himself, but it has not had a real playtest yet.

1. Install NeoForge, Forge, Fabric for Minecraft 1.21.1. The install guide walks through this assuming no prior knowledge.
2. Drop the mod's .jar file into your mods folder.
3. Everyone on the server needs it.
4. Launch the game with that loader's profile selected.

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