VECTOR HUD
Most interface mods give you the same boxes in a different colour. VECTOR HUD does something rarer: it draws every ring, tape and gauge as live vector geometry at runtime. There are no textures behind the instruments, which means nothing blurs at any resolution and the whole assembly boots like a machine powering on rather than a menu fading in. Press J and the HUD builds itself in five beats, in under two seconds.
What the Boot Actually Looks Like
Registration marks slide in from off-screen and spark as they seat, establishing the corners before anything else exists. Each ring and gauge is then drawn with the pen running from the arc's fixed end toward its live value, so a gauge can never overshoot its own track. Instruments flash brighter than full for three ticks when they lock. The chromatic fringe starts wide and tightens as the optics focus. Text resolves last, each label scrambling through same-width glyphs so no line shifts by a single pixel while it settles. Press J again and it strikes itself back down.
Supported Versions and Loaders
Every Fabric version from 1.20.1 to 1.21.11 is covered, alongside NeoForge 1.21.1 and Forge 1.20.1. Every build is client-side, so nothing is installed on the server and nothing needs to be. Fabric builds generally want Fabric Loader 0.16.0 or newer plus Fabric API, while older 1.20.x releases run on Java 17. The settings screen opens from Mod Menu on Fabric and from the Mods list on NeoForge and Forge.
If you would rather skip the manual file matching entirely, the foxygame.net launcher handles it for you: it detects your installed game version, picks the matching VECTOR HUD build automatically, and keeps it updated between sessions without you touching a single jar file.
Flight Instruments and the Holo-Map
The HUD reads like a cockpit the moment you leave the ground. The instrument set includes:
- HORIZON — artificial horizon with pitch ladder and roll
- ALT · Y — altitude tape, ticking every block of climb
- HDG — heading tape
- SPD — ground speed
- GLIDE 1:x — live glide ratio on elytra
- VSI — signed vertical speed
The volumetric holo-map sits near-horizontal so it reads as a volume rather than a top-down minimap. It follows your vertical look: glance up and the table rises to show the air above, look down and it lays flat to show your footing. Mobs float as pins at their true height, each with a drop-line to the floor beneath them. Four or more hostiles close together get a footprint on the map, and when a new group appears beyond the visible section while you stand still, the map glides over to it for a few seconds and back.
Alerts That Respect Their Tiers
Alerts are staged in four tiers — calm, caution, warning, imminent. A sound is only re-issued when the tier rises; while the tier holds, you get one quiet reminder per interval and nothing more. Terrain collision narrows GLIDE PATH to IMPACT, and walls are picked by face normal rather than raw distance, so ordinary gliding does not trip it. Damage arcs light on the screen edge in the direction the hit came from, and creeper proximity fires before the hiss, not with it.
Thirteen Instrument Suites
Themes change layout, not only colour. Each one hides a different set of instruments, so the sparse suites are genuinely sparse rather than the same HUD in a new palette. APEX rotates into battle, DRAFT gives you a cyan skeleton with amber readouts, GHOST runs near-silent on a green vocabulary, and TERMINAL docks five functions in green. SCAN brings brackets and a frameless holo-map that fades at its edges, while NANO turns generative: near-silent at rest, with callouts assembling from particles when something matters, then dissolving. RAPTOR, SHOTGUN, GINSU, AEGIS and RELAY each get upright rows in their own style. Press H for the theme table.
Server Fair Play, On by Default
Whenever you are not in singleplayer — on a server, in a LAN world or on Realms — the HUD only shows what you can actually see. The holo-map pins, hostile-group markers, radar, health bars, target marks and alerts use only mobs and players in your line of sight; a block between you and a mob hides it. In singleplayer nothing is held back. Six features ship disabled, and they are the six a server admin would call cheating: ore scan, structure scan, entity radar, wall-piercing glow, nearby player list and ballistics prediction. While Server Fair Play is active, five of them cannot be switched on at all. To turn it off, open the settings screen with K, go to Fair play, or set "serverFairPlay": false in config/vectorhud.json.
Keys, Configuration and Requirements
Four keys drive everything: J brings the HUD up or strikes it down, H opens the theme table, C toggles the scope and B engages battle mode. All four are rebindable under Controls. Every panel has its own toggle in config/vectorhud.json and under /vectorhud, and /vectorhud scale resizes the whole assembly between 0.5 and 2.0.
So if you want a cockpit that boots like hardware instead of a texture pack that merely recolours your screen, download VECTOR HUD and press J. Learning how to install it takes a couple of minutes on any supported loader, and the fair-play defaults mean you can drop the same jar into a modpack without a second thought.