Unleash Siege Warfare with the Customizable Artillery Mod
Few things in Minecraft rival the satisfaction of launching a TNT block across a ravine or pelting a pillager outpost with a volley of fire charges. The Customizable Artillery Mod transforms that fantasy into a deeply personal engineering project, letting you craft, tune, and operate your own cannons down to the last iron ingot. Instead of a single static weapon, you get a modular system where barrel caliber, chassis design, armor thickness, and even camouflage patterns all shape how your artillery performs on the battlefield.
Crafting Your Custom Artillery
The crafting system rewards patience and experimentation. Every component is built from scratch, and the choices you make at the bench directly affect speed, power, and handling.
Barrel and Cannon Assembly
Start with a basic Barrel made from six iron ingots. That humble tube is just the beginning—you can widen its caliber through six stages (50 to 300) by crafting barrels lengthways, and extend its length up to sixteen stages (100 to 1600) by lining them up. Once you have the barrel dimensions you want, combine it with a cauldron to form a Cannon. For rapid-fire enthusiasts, adding an auto loader during this step automates reloading later.
Chassis and Mobility
A cannon needs a sturdy base. First, craft Tracks using one iron block and eight iron bars. Then build a Carriage from three weighted iron pressure plates and two iron ingots; improved carriages turn the barrel faster. Assemble the Chassis by combining a carriage with two tracks. If you want powered movement, craft an Engine and include it when building the chassis—this lets the artillery crawl across the landscape like a tank.
Final Assembly and Options
Combine the Cannon and Chassis to create your finished Artillery piece. Before heading into combat, you can harden it with armor plates—thicker plating reduces damage from small, slow entities but makes the whole rig heavier. Camouflage is purely cosmetic and doesn’t affect performance. Paint your artillery by crafting it with specific items: gray dye for the default look, stone for urban camo, leaves for woodland, sand or sandstone for desert, and snowballs or snow blocks for winter operations.
If the multi-step crafting feels overwhelming, you can simplify your modding workflow with the foxygame.net launcher, a modern and flexible tool that lets you download and install mods like this one directly from its menu, so you spend less time fiddling with files and more time perfecting your cannon’s range.
Performance and Customization
Every design decision ripples through your artillery’s stats. The relationship between barrel dimensions and performance is logical but unforgiving:
- Caliber: A wider barrel lets you shoot more and larger projectiles, but reload time, movement speed, and accuracy all suffer.
- Length: Longer barrels increase projectile velocity and precision, at the cost of mobility.
- Carriage: Upgraded carriages rotate the barrel faster but don’t improve the artillery’s own movement.
- Engine: A stronger engine boosts driving speed without affecting barrel traverse.
- Armor: Thicker plates shield against melee and weak ranged attacks but slow everything down; they cannot reduce fire or lava damage.
Camouflage patterns remain purely visual, so pick the one that matches your biome without worrying about hidden stat penalties.
Operating Your Artillery
Once your masterpiece is placed, right-click to mount it. Press the R key to open the control GUI, which is split into several sections:
- Ammo Window: Displays the currently loaded projectile. You can’t place items here directly, only remove them.
- Ammo Slots: Store extra ammunition here; it reloads automatically when the chamber empties.
- Gunpowder Window and Slots: Work identically for propellant. TNT can be used instead of gunpowder for extra punch.
- Fuel Slot: Required if your artillery has an engine. Any item that burns in a furnace works as fuel.
- Info Panel: Shows current stats and status.
Right-click while riding to fire. The mod accepts nearly anything a dispenser can eject—TNT, arrows, fire charges, creeper spawn eggs, lava buckets, stone blocks, fences, and even modded projectiles like bamboo spears or shells. For the full explosive experience, pairing this mod with a dedicated shell mod is highly recommended.
Tips and Tricks
- Larger or more numerous bullets eject slower than smaller, single shots—balance burst damage against fire rate.
- Mobs can drive and fire artillery, including zombies, sheep, and most mod-added creatures.
- Artillery can ride on minecarts for rail-based artillery trains.
- The vehicle is treated as an animal, so potion effects like Instant Health splash potions can repair it.
- Arrows fired from the cannon deal damage based on their ejection speed; long barrels make them lethal.
- You can decorate banners and paintings as “symbols” on your artillery.
- Bigger, faster entities deal more effective damage to armored artillery.
- Even if the driver’s seat is covered by armor, you can still hit the driver—damage is merely reduced.
- Name your artillery with a nametag for easy identification.
- With enough gunpowder, you can use the cannon as a construction tool, firing blocks to build structures from a distance.
- A new gunpowder recipe is included and can be disabled in the config file if desired.
Dependencies and Compatibility
The Customizable Artillery Mod requires Minecraft Forge. It works alongside most mods that add dispensable items, and mobs from other mods can often operate the cannons. While the vanilla recipe book struggles with the mod’s complex recipes, the crafting system remains fully functional through manual assembly. Future updates may introduce stationary cannons, improved models, and multi-barrel configurations that resemble massive miniguns.
Whether you’re laying siege to a woodland mansion or building a mobile fortress, this mod turns Minecraft into a sandbox of destructive creativity. Every iron ingot, every engineering choice, and every fired shot feels personal—and that’s exactly what makes it unforgettable.