Vertical Cut

A Fabric mod for Minecraft 26.3 (needed on both client and server). It shows a vertical cross-section of the terrain in front of you in a corner of the screen, drawn by a coal-powered Rock Tomograph (CRT) you carry, so you can spot ores, caves and structures without digging.

This is a rewrite of the original Vertical Cut mod for Minecraft 1.5–1.6 (old forum page).

Status: all six CRTs are in: Stone, Copper, Iron, Gold, Diamond and Netherite.

Download: GitHub releases.

The wiki has a page for every item, a getting started guide and tips.

• The cut only works while you hold a CRT (offhand or main hand).
• Stone CRT, the starter device. Recipe (cobblestone, blackstone or cobbled deepslate all work):

  C G C      C = cobblestone, G = glass pane
  C T C      T = torch
  C C C
  

  It is a crude cave finder: it shows caves, water and lava, but no ores. The picture lags behind when you walk, and it flickers and buzzes now and then.
• Copper CRT, the upgrade. Shows ores as bright dots, a steady picture, and only flickers rarely. Made on the smithing table: torch + Stone CRT + Copper Picture Tube. The tube:

  C C C      C = copper ingot
  C T C      T = torch
  C C C
  

  The fuel in the CRT carries over to the upgrade.
• Iron CRT, the next upgrade: the first color picture, sees twice as far (64×64 blocks), no flicker of its own and 2 module slots. Smithing table: torch + Copper CRT + Iron Picture Tube. The tube:

  I I I      I = iron ingot
  I R I      R = redstone torch
  I I I
  

• Gold CRT, the upgrade after Iron: like Iron, but B zooms in to 32×32 blocks and back out to 64×64 (with a moment of snow and a click; the step is remembered). Smithing table: torch + Iron CRT + Gold Picture Tube, made like the iron tube from 8 gold ingots and a redstone torch.
• Diamond CRT, the upgrade after Gold: 3 module slots, and B steps through 32×32, 64×64 and 128×128 blocks. Smithing table: torch + Gold CRT + Diamond Picture Tube, made from 8 diamonds around a redstone torch.
• Netherite CRT, the last upgrade, made the vanilla way: netherite upgrade template + Diamond CRT + netherite ingot on the smithing table. Like Diamond, plus: living things up to 4 blocks beside the cut show as dots: hostile red with a heartbeat pulse, neutral green (red as soon as it attacks), peaceful yellow, other players as white stick figures. No interference gets through, and it survives fire and lava. Your client only knows mobs within its entity range, so the far edge of the widest picture may stay empty.
• Recipes appear in the recipe book when you pick up cobblestone, a copper, iron or gold ingot, a diamond, or the CRT to be upgraded.
• The Vertical Cut advancement tab follows the CRT from Stone to Netherite, each with a little riddle.
• In both black and white CRTs, water is mid grey and lava blinks.
• CRTs burn coal: one coal or charcoal lasts 4 minutes of scanning (adjustable from 60 to 600 seconds in the settings; on a server, the server's setting counts) and is taken from your inventory automatically when the CRT runs dry. It only burns while the cut is shown. The durability bar shows the coal that is burning right now. A new CRT starts empty.
• Module slots: sneak + right-click with the CRT opens them. The Stone CRT has none, the Copper CRT has one.
• Coal pouch: put any bundle (modded bundles too) without an amethyst shard into a module slot. The CRT then eats only from the bundle, never from your inventory, and it eats anything that burns in a furnace, worth as much as it would burn there compared to coal (a coal block is 10 coals, a lava bucket 12.5 and gives the empty bucket back). Careful: it burns enchanted wooden tools just as happily. Small fuels like sticks are eaten in batches of about one coal's worth. The CRT stores up to 256 coals' worth; whatever doesn't fit stays in the bundle. With a pouch, a thin bar beside the picture shows stored fuel plus the bundle (full at 64 coals), and the tooltip shows both numbers.
• Finder bundle: a bundle with an amethyst shard in it, in a module slot. Every ore sample in it makes that ore flash in the picture: white, its own color, black, its own color, so with several samples you still see which ore is which. A sample is anything made of the ore: raw ore, ingot, a single nugget, gem, dust or block (coal, iron, copper, gold, redstone, lapis, diamond, emerald, quartz, netherite scrap for ancient debris; deepslate and nether variants included). Modded ores work too when the mod uses the common c: tags (an item in c:ingots/tin finds the blocks in c:ores/tin). A chest as sample makes every block with an inventory flash (chests, barrels, shulker boxes, hoppers, furnaces, and modded ones that work like vanilla chests). Nothing in a finder bundle is ever burned, coal included. A shard in your coal pouch turns it into a finder bundle, and it stops feeding the CRT.
• Interference: lit portals (nether portal, end portal, end gateway; not the frames) within about 6 blocks and the nearest enderman within 8 blocks disturb the picture with snow and buzzing, the closer the worse; an angry enderman twice as much.
• Lightning rod module: any lightning rod in a module slot shields against three quarters of the interference.
• Compass module: a compass in a module slot. K locks the cut in the direction you look (any angle, e.g. a diagonal tunnel), K again lets it follow your view. A needle at the top of the picture shows where the cut points and turns green and thick with a clink when you face that way; the antennas of the CRT in your hand light up as well. A lodestone compass points the cut at its lodestone.
• Spyglass module: a spyglass in a module slot. J flips the picture between near (as usual) and deep: the deep picture goes on where the near one ends, one full picture lower, but never below the bottom of the world. You stand above it, a dotted line in your color marks your position; near the bottom, where you fit into the picture, you are the stick figure again. Taking the spyglass out or the CRT dying brings back the near picture.
• Depth Gauge module (3 sticks in a column, 3 copper nuggets beside them): a white ruler along the left edge of the picture with the Y level at your feet and every 8 blocks above and below.
• Hold Shift over a CRT or the tube for a short explanation.
• Stone and Copper CRT show 32×32 blocks.
• V shows or hides the cut, K locks its direction (compass module), J looks deeper (spyglass module), B zooms (Gold, Diamond and Netherite CRT). Those are the only keys bound by default.
• Settings (CRT must be in hand, corner, distance from edge, size, opacity, CRT sounds, seconds per coal, color of the stick figure that shows you, color blind colors: blue instead of green for the compass needle and neutral mobs) are in Mod Menu → Vertical Cut → Configure and are saved in config/verticalcut.json. With "CRT must be in hand" off, a CRT anywhere in the inventory scans, by the same rules (fuel, modules). There is always a CRT needed.
• Keys for opacity and the settings screen exist but are unbound; bind them in Options → Controls → Key Binds → Vertical Cut if you want them.

Translations

All player-facing text is in src/main/resources/assets/verticalcut/lang/en_us.json. To translate, copy it to your language code (for example de_de.json), translate the values and keep the keys and %s placeholders as they are.

Building and testing (Linux)

You need JDK 25 (java -version and javac -version must both say 25), git and IntelliJ IDEA.

First time:

1. In IntelliJ: File → New → Project from Version Control, URL https://github.com/Knito58/vertical-cut.
2. Wait until the Gradle import at the bottom right finishes. The first time it downloads Minecraft and Fabric, which takes a few minutes.
3. Open the Gradle tool window (elephant icon on the right) and run Tasks → fabric → runClient. Minecraft starts with the mod loaded.

After that, to get the newest version: Git → Pull, then run runClient again.

To build the mod file for your modpack, run Tasks → build → build. The jar is in build/libs/ (take the one without -sources) and goes into the modpack's mods folder.

Every push also builds the mod on GitHub. The jar can be downloaded from the Actions tab, under the latest run, in "Artifacts".

License

MIT. See LICENSE. (The original 1.5–1.6 mod was GPL-2.0; this is a full rewrite.)