July 2026 dev log: one fire wand turns into five mods

The other posts on this page each take one system apart. These monthly ones are the diary: what I worked on, what broke, what it taught me, with the dates. This first one goes back to where it all started, at the very end of June.

30 June: one wand

The first thing I ever finished was a Fire Wand. One stick and one coal, click to throw a fireball, 100 uses, and it stops at its last point instead of breaking. From day one I set a rule that’s still in the Magic Pack today: wands are instant, staves are slow. A wand fires the moment you click. Anything you hold down and charge up is a staff.

Bedrock said no to the very first idea, which was a little flick of the arm when the wand casts. The resource pack (the half of an add-on that draws things) can’t tell that an instant cast happened unless the item has a hold timer, and a hold timer is exactly what a wand mustn’t have. So the wand got a hold pose and the cast animation went on the shelf.

Early July: a new name

These mods started out under my old handle, iPrecision. In early July the studio became Lost Logic Studios and everything got renamed to LLS: every folder, every file, every id. The rename broke the links between the packs, which all had to be fixed the same day. Lesson learned: rename early, rename everything, and do it once.

3 July: the day I lost to a stale copy

I spent a whole day fixing the Shock Wand in water. Fix after fix “didn’t work”, so I threw each one out and tried something else. None of them had ever reached the game. Minecraft runs its own copy of a pack, my copy step hadn’t run, and I spent the whole day testing the version from midnight.

Working fixes got binned as broken. Since then the copy step mirrors the whole folder, prints SYNC FAILED in red when Minecraft has a file locked, and the first thing I check when a fix makes no sense is whether the game is even running it.

5 July: staves, tomes and an eyeball

A busy one. The Fire, Frost and Shock staves went in: a 0.8 second cast instead of the wand’s snap, a bigger and slower projectile, and a blast that hits everything within three blocks. Frost freezes in a ring, Shock chains to six targets.

Tomes started the same day, held in the off hand. Bedrock never fires its “item used” event for the off hand, so a tome casts when you start sneaking instead.

And the first pet: an eyeball you tame with a spider eye. It’s the Wandering Eye now, in Magic Companions. Dyeing its iris took three goes. Vanilla’s way of making a mob dyeable did nothing, with a completely clean log, because it only works on vanilla mobs. What finally worked was writing the dye names the way vanilla’s own files do: blue_dye, not minecraft:blue_dye.

6 and 7 July: a snail that climbs walls

The snail mount rides like a camel: tame it with mushrooms, saddle it, go. The hard part was the climbing. Bedrock’s climbing component only works when a mob walks on its own, and does nothing at all with a rider steering. So a script watches for a ridden snail pushing into a wall at least two blocks tall and lifts it a little every tick.

Three more snail bugs from those two days:

• It walked backwards, because the model was built facing the wrong way.
• The saddle wouldn’t go on. A camel’s saddle needs three separate pieces in the mob’s file. With only one, it silently doesn’t work.
• It froze for four seconds after every fall. Fall damage was setting off the hide-in-its-shell reaction, and with no animation for it yet, it just looked like lag. The shell-hide came out until there’s an animation to sell it.

6 July: dungeons that build themselves

The dungeons (the Sulfur Dungeons in the Magic Pack now) are put together from ten rooms I built by hand, each 15 by 15 by 10. The first layouts had doorways opening straight into solid walls, so now every room has to agree with all of its neighbours: door to door, wall to wall. Dead ends are picked to fit exactly, so they never open a new hole, and the loot room always lands at the deepest point.

The dungeon got a guard too: a gargoyle that stands still among stone statues and wakes when you get close. That’s the Hoggoyle now. And a trader whose dungeon map is always in stock. Using the map picks a spot 250 to 400 blocks away, and the dungeon builds itself when you come within 64 blocks of it. By the end of the day it was playable co-op from the map to the loot.

8 July: Night Lite, and doors that actually swing

Night Lite started as one simple idea: a light that keeps your base safe. Place an LLS torch or lantern and it keeps the chunks around it loaded and stops monsters spawning within 32 blocks. Bedrock only allows 10 ticking areas (spots that stay loaded) per world, so lights close together share one, and a light over the limit still blocks spawns. Chat commands were beta-only back then, so the switch for the zone borders became an item: the Zone Viewer.

The same day the barn doors were rebuilt from scratch. Bedrock blocks can’t animate, so the old doors just snapped open and shut. The new ones are entities (things that can move, like a mob) that slide or swing, with invisible blocks filling the doorway while they’re shut. Clicking them was its own problem: the script event for clicking an entity never fired, so the door uses the game’s own interact component instead. That came to 144 doors: 12 woods, three sizes, sliding or swinging, plain or windowed. They live in Missing Blocks now.

10 and 11 July: a calendar and a combine

Seasons became a mod of its own: four seasons of seven days and a clock in the corner. In Bedrock one pack can’t read another pack’s saved data, so the other farm packs read the date off a scoreboard instead. Traders got working hours as well: in at 8am, gone by 8pm.

Farm Vehicles started that week too, with a combine, a tractor and a grain cart. I locked the controls early and they’ve stayed locked. Getting in starts the engine, getting out stops it, the vehicle’s one button is the work button (header up and down on the combine), and nothing ever needs a new key. Scripts can’t read sprint at all, so nothing was ever going to live on Shift.

What July taught me

• Check the game is running the version you just edited before you debug anything.
• Bedrock fails quietly. Most of July’s bugs came with no error at all. I wrote up the worst of them later in five Bedrock bugs that fail without an error.
• When the platform says no, find the vanilla mob that already does it (the camel, for the snail) and copy it exactly.

Next month: the website goes up, the farm packs become one download, and a combine refuses to climb one block.