🎯 What it is
A challenge mod with one rule. A new pickaxe, axe, shovel, hoe or sword is completely normal until it breaks its first block, or lands its first kill. At that moment it commits, forever, to that one kind of thing: a pickaxe that first broke gravel is a gravel pickaxe, perfect on sand and gravel and no better than your bare fist on anything else. A grindstone is the only way to make it forget.
You craft a diamond pickaxe and, on the way down the shaft, you clear a patch of gravel with it because it was in the way. There is a soft anvil click, a little pip appears on the icon, and the tooltip now says Bound: Sand & Gravel. It will never mine stone again. So you start thinking before the first swing, the way you have never had to think in this game, and within a week you own a labelled chest of specialists: the stone pick, the coal pick, the obsidian pick, and a sword that killed a cow once and is now the cow sword. The failure mode is a story, not a death.
👥 Playing with friends
Bindings live on the item; lend out the gravel pickaxe and it is still the gravel pickaxe
⚠️ Before you install
- Verified only on a headless server: the bind itself, break speeds, sword damage and the pip have never been watched in a live game client.
- This is a challenge mod. You will craft, carry and label far more tools than vanilla ever asked of you. That is the point.
⏱️ Your first 5 minutes
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
- Craft any tool. It stays completely vanilla until it commits.
- Break one block you actually want it for. A pickaxe on stone binds it to Stone: quiet click, coloured pip, one tooltip line.
- Now swing the same pickaxe at copper ore. Fist speed, no drops. That is the deal you made.
- Kill something with a fresh sword. Whatever died decides what the sword is for. A stray cow smack is safe, only the kill counts.
- Regret it? Put the tool on a grindstone. The binding comes off, along with the enchantments.
- Run /onetrick categorize gravel to ask which category anything falls in before you commit.
🔁 How it works
Binding
A pickaxe, axe, shovel or hoe binds the first time it successfully breaks a block it was the correct tool for, meaning an effective break that would actually drop something. A pickaxe swung at dirt never binds, a wooden pickaxe on diamond ore never binds, and an axe clearing a sapling never binds, because none of those count. Swords bind on their first kill, not their first hit, to the victim's category. Looted and traded tools always arrive unbound.
Tip: Instant-breaking blocks and anything softer than the hardness floor never bind a tool. Clearing grass is free.
Outside the binding
Inside its category the tool is exactly vanilla. Outside it, the tool mines at bare-hand speed and counts as no tool for drops, so a gravel pickaxe on stone is slow and yields nothing. A sword outside its binding deals 1 damage and does not sweep. Durability is still spent either way: using the wrong tool is allowed, it is just bad.
Tip: outsideSpeed = HALF in the config softens the penalty from a fist to half speed if the full rule is too cruel.
The categories
Categories are broad on purpose so one mistake is survivable. A pickaxe can be Stone, Common Ore, Precious Ore, Netherrack, End Stone, Building Blocks, Metal, Obsidian or Ice; a sword can be Animals, Undead, Creepers, Illagers, Arthropods, Nether Mobs, Ender Mobs, Slimes, Sea Life, Villagers & Golems or Players. Every tool kind also has an Odds & Ends catch-all, so nothing is ever bound to nothing. The NARROW preset splits ores one by one and wood by species, so an oak axe is not a birch axe.
Tip: The categories are a datapack. Your own pack can add, replace or delete them, and /onetrick reload applies it live.
The grindstone
A grindstone clears the binding, alongside the enchantments vanilla already strips. That is the whole escape hatch, and it is priced exactly like vanilla prices disenchanting: you lose the enchantments to free the tool. Servers that want bindings to be truly permanent can set rebind = NEVER.
Anvils, repairs and netherite
Repairs, renames, enchanting and netherite upgrades all carry the binding across unchanged. Combining two bound tools on an anvil keeps the left tool's binding. Nothing you do at an anvil ever frees a tool; only the grindstone does that.
Daily Driver
An optional harder mode, mode = DAILY in the config. Instead of each tool binding to a category, the first tool you use after dawn is your only tool for the whole day, and everything else in your inventory acts as if outside its binding until the next sunrise. If you lose the chosen tool, you may pick again.
What you see
A small coloured pip on the item icon in any inventory slot, coloured by category. No pip means the tool is still free, which is the thing you actually want to know at a glance in a chest full of pickaxes. One tooltip line, an optional action-bar line at the moment of binding, a quiet anvil click, and three advancements. No chat messages, ever.
🎒 Items & blocks
🎯
A Bound Tool
Any vanilla tool or sword after its first effective break or first kill. It carries a coloured pip and a tooltip line naming its category, and it is a specialist from then on.
Where: Use a fresh tool on the thing you want it bound to. There are no new items; every tool in the game is one first swing away from this.
🎯
The Cow Sword
A sword bound to Animals, so it does full damage to cows, pigs, sheep and chickens and exactly 1 damage to the zombie currently chewing on you. It has its own advancement.
Where: Kill a cow with a fresh sword. Usually by accident. Usually while hungry.
📜 Lore
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
One trick
No toolsmith will explain it, and the villagers change the subject. A tool decides what it is the first time it bites into the world, and after that it simply declines to be anything else. The old miners do not call this a curse. They call it professional focus, and they label their chests.
🎁 Jokes & trivia
Bits you might miss
- Creepers are their own sword category, separate from every other mob, on purpose. The creeper sword only kills creepers, and you will make one anyway.
- The advancement for binding a sword to Animals is called The Cow Sword. Its description reads: You know what you did.
- A sword bound to Players is the PvP sword. It deals 1 damage to every monster in the game and full damage to your friends.
- Shears and flint and steel are exempt from binding. Nobody needs a sheep-only pair of shears.
- Under NARROW, an oak axe cannot chop birch. Somewhere a spruce axe hangs on a wall, waiting for the right forest.
- The catch-all category every tool can fall into is officially named Odds & Ends, which is a fine thing to have committed a diamond pickaxe to.
From the workshop
- The mod registers zero items, blocks or entities. The binding is data stored on the vanilla tool, and the pip is drawn as coloured rectangles rather than a texture, which is why a resource pack cannot break it.
- All three loader versions share a byte-identical core and run the same 104 unit tests, so the suites agree by construction rather than by effort.
- The grindstone result had to be built by hand in code, because vanilla returns an empty slot for unenchanted items and would otherwise have eaten the tool.
- Binding needed a minimum-hardness floor after testing showed that saplings legally count as axe blocks, which would have bound axes to shrubbery.
- Two categories were renamed late purely for how they read on a tooltip: Building Blocks and Soul Sand & Soil.
- Ships 70 category files, and a validator confirms every vanilla block lands in exactly one category per tool.
❓ FAQ
Can this delete or ruin my items?
No. The mod never destroys, removes or edits anything in an inventory. A badly bound tool keeps working inside its category forever, and a grindstone frees it.
Is there any way to un-bind a tool?
The grindstone, which also strips enchantments, exactly like vanilla disenchanting. That is the only way, unless the server config says even that is off.
Do enchantments and netherite upgrades keep the binding?
Yes. Anvil work, repairs, renames and netherite upgrades all carry it. Combining two bound tools keeps the left one's binding.
Do tools from loot chests or villager trades come pre-bound?
No. Every tool arrives unbound and fully vanilla, no matter where it came from. Only its own first effective break or kill commits it.
What happens in creative mode?
Nothing. Creative ignores the entire mod.
Will it spam my chat?
Never. The whole feedback surface is a pip on the icon, one tooltip line, one optional action-bar line at the moment of binding, and three advancements.
⬇️ Get it
Status: The jar compiles and the author has tested it himself, but it has not had a real playtest yet.
- Install NeoForge, Forge, Fabric for Minecraft 1.21.1. 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-one-trick/build/libs/.
Bulletpies
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