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Minecraft: Java Edition
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Details
The bucket progression vanilla never finished.
A vanilla-first tier ladder for buckets: a cheap wooden one, a tougher bamboo one, a permanent copper one — and a quietly revised iron recipe.
⚠️ Targets Minecraft 26.1.2, the first post-deobfuscation snapshot. Won't load on earlier versions.
The tiers
| Tier | Material | Durability | Empty stacks to | Powder snow |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🪣 Wooden | 3 planks + 3 sticks | ~16 uses, then breaks | 1 | — |
| 🎋 Bamboo | 3 bamboo planks + 3 bamboo | ~32 uses, then breaks | 1 | — |
| 🟠 Copper | 3 copper ingots + 3 copper chains | permanent (never breaks) | 16 | ✅ |
| ⚙️ Iron (vanilla) | 3 iron ingots + 3 iron chains | permanent | 16 | ✅ |
- 🪣 Wooden — the cheapest way to carry water. Light and disposable: ~16 uses before it breaks. Great for your first nether trip or an early farm.
- 🎋 Bamboo — looks and works like wood, but twice as tough (~32 uses). A natural step up if you have a bamboo farm before you have spare iron.
- 🟠 Copper — the mid-tier sweet spot. Like the iron bucket it's permanent (no durability, never breaks) and the empty bucket stacks to 16, and like iron it can scoop powder snow. Cheaper than iron, and it doesn't oxidise (matching vanilla copper tools).
- ⚙️ Iron — the unmodified vanilla bucket. Only its recipe changes (see below); behaviour is 100% vanilla.
Variants
| Variant | How you get it |
|---|---|
| Empty | Craft it (see recipes). |
| Water | Right-click a water source with the empty bucket. |
| Milk | Right-click a cow with the empty bucket — drink it to clear effects, just like vanilla milk. |
| Powder snow (copper only) | Right-click powder snow with an empty copper bucket; right-click to place it back. |
Recipes
| Wooden | Bamboo |
|---|---|
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| Copper | Iron (revised) |
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Why the iron recipe changes: vanilla's bucket shares its ▢ ▢ / ▢ shape with nothing in particular, but the new mod buckets all use the "3 across the top + U" layout — so iron joins them (3 iron chains + 3 iron ingots) for a consistent family and to keep the simple ▢ ▢ / ▢ arrangement free for the wooden bowl. The override ships two ways for robustness: a runtime recipe rewrite on NeoForge and a static datapack recipe on Fabric.
The water, milk and powder-snow variants are not crafted — you obtain them in-world (fill / milk / scoop).
Mechanics in detail
Durability & repair (wood, bamboo). These use real vanilla durability: they show the normal durability bar, wear down with use, and break when exhausted. Because they're genuine damageable items you can repair them by combining two damaged buckets of the same type in the crafting grid — exactly like repairing a pickaxe. (Being damageable, they don't stack — one per slot.)
Permanence & stacking (copper, iron). Copper has no durability at all — it never breaks, never needs repair, and the empty bucket stacks to 16 so you can haul a column of them. (Minecraft forbids an item from being both damageable and stackable, so this is a deliberate trade: copper trades the durability bar for permanence + stacking, matching iron.)
Powder snow (copper). The empty copper bucket scoops powder snow and places it back, just like the iron bucket — the wooden and bamboo buckets hold water only.
Milk. Right-click any cow with a wood/bamboo/copper empty bucket to get the matching milk bucket; drinking clears status effects like vanilla.
Under the hood
- Two loaders, no Architectury. NeoForge and Fabric, each a self-contained project, logic mirrored rather than shared — a deliberate choice for MC 26.1's bleeding-edge toolchain.
- Minecraft 26.1.2, the first post-deobfuscation snapshot (Mojang official names).
- 30 language translations included;
en_usis canonical and the rest are full translations (French uses « seau »). - Textures are generated from vanilla references by a committed pipeline (
tools/), and a Python resource validator (tests/validate.py) gates every build.