OpenFlares – Flare Guns!

OpenFlares adds a configurable, multiplayer-ready flare gun system to Minecraft. Load colored cartridges, fire server-authoritative flare projectiles, and leave dense smoke trails that can remain visible far beyond vanilla chunk render distance when the server allows it.

Fire a flare gun loaded with yellow, green, red, black, purple, or blue cartridges. The server simulates the flare projectile, publishes smoke clouds to clients, and controls the gameplay-facing limits. Clients render the smoke with configurable visual styles, optional long-distance smoke, and accessibility settings for players who need clearer color identification.

Feature Highlights

• Flare gun item with empty and colored flare cartridges.
• Yellow, green, red, black, purple, and blue flare colors.
• Loading, unloading, firing, and reload-preference controls.
• Crafting recipes for the flare gun, empty cartridges, and colored cartridges.
• Server-authoritative flare projectile travel, limits, collision behavior, and smoke publication.
• Configurable projectile speed, gravity, drag, maximum distance, flight timeout, hit damage, smoke lifetime, smoke opacity, and smoke size.
• Long-distance 3D flare smoke that can render beyond vanilla chunk render distance when enabled by the client and allowed by the server.
• Server-side far-smoke line-of-sight occlusion, so distant smoke can be hidden by opaque terrain even if the obstruction is outside the player’s chunk render distance all the while transparent blocks such as glass remain see-through.
• Adaptive far-smoke occlusion budgets for ray checks and optional missing-chunk loading.
• Client-side stable smoke colors, enabled by default, to reduce lighting, view-angle, and background color shifts.
• Optional color-blind accessibility label that names the flare smoke color the player is looking at.
• Optional background behind accessibility labels for extra readability.
• Fabric Mod Menu and NeoForge mod-list config screens.
• Separate client-side and server-side config screens.
• /openflares reload server command for op-level config reloads.

Smoke Renderer Options

The server selects the smoke renderer and syncs that choice to clients.

| Renderer |Description |
| ————————————– |———————————————————————————————————————- |
| Friday’s Vanilla+ Textures |Default renderer. Uses FridayNextWeek’s color-specific texture sets, with a dedicated look for each flare color. |
| Friday’s Vanilla+ Textures #2 |Uses FridayNextWeek’s generic Vanilla+ smoke frames for a softer vanilla-style sequence. |
| Minecraft Smoke Textures |Uses vanilla Minecraft smoke particle frames while keeping OpenFlares distance, occlusion, and far-rendering behavior. |
| OpenFlares Particles (Spherical) |Dense, clean OpenFlares spherical particle smoke. |
| OpenFlares Particles (Spherical-Bumpy) |Rougher spherical OpenFlares smoke using Arrowstorm_1000’s CC-BY-SA-4.0 bumpy smoke texture. |
| OpenFlares Billboards |Stylized layered billboard smoke with a broad silhouette. |

Accessibility

OpenFlares includes smoke readability options intended to help players identify flare colors in difficult lighting or when color perception varies between players.

• Stable smoke colors are enabled by default.
• Black flare smoke is rendered as pure black.
• The optional smoke color label can be off, a pop-up label, or a persistent label.
• When multiple flare colors are under the crosshair, the label can show the closest color or list all visible colors from closest to farthest.
• The label position and text scale are configurable independently from the flare gun reload-preference overlay.

Configuration

OpenFlares writes two TOML config files:

| File |Side |Purpose |
| ———————– |—— |————————————————————————————————— |
| open_flares-client.toml |Client |Local smoke rendering, overlays, and accessibility settings. |
| open_flares-server.toml |Server |Flare gun behavior, projectile simulation, smoke behavior, network limits, and far-smoke occlusion. |

In single player and locally hosted worlds, the server-side config screen edits the server settings for worlds hosted from that Minecraft install. On dedicated servers, edit open_flares-server.toml on the server host, then run /openflares reload server as an operator to reload and sync the settings.

Supported Targets

| Minecraft |Fabric |NeoForge |
| ——— |——— |——— |
| 1.21.1 |Supported |Supported |
| 1.21.11 |Supported |Supported |
| 26.1.2 |Supported |Supported |
| 26.2 |Supported |Supported |

Runtime Dependencies

Install the OpenFlares jar that matches both your Minecraft version and your loader.

| Loader |Dependencies |
| ——– |—————————————————— |
| Fabric |Fabric Loader, Fabric API, and Fabric Language Kotlin. |
| NeoForge |NeoForge and Kotlin for Forge. |

For multiplayer, install OpenFlares on the server and on every client that wants to use or see OpenFlares content.

License And Credits

OpenFlares code, documentation, build logic, translations, data files, and UI definitions are licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later.

Most original OpenFlares art, audio and texture assets are licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0 unless stated otherwise. New original OpenFlares assets use CC-BY-SA-4.0 by default unless their file-level metadata documents a different license.

Some visual and sound assets use their own licenses. See CREDITS.md, COPYRIGHT.md, and REUSE.toml in the source-code repository for the authoritative asset credits and license metadata.

Contributor submitted assets:

| Author |Asset(s) |License |
| ————— |——————————- |———— |
| Arrowstorm_1000 |flare_smoke_spherical_bumpy.png |CC-BY-SA-4.0 |

External asset credits recorded in REUSE.toml:

| Author |Asset(s) |License |
| ————– |———————————————————————————— |——— |
| FridayNextWeek |Friday’s Vanilla+ smoke texture frames in textures/particle/fridays_vanilla_plus/ |ARR |
| SpringySpringo |flare_gun_reloading_2.ogg, source: https://opengameart.org/content/gun-reload-sounds |CC0-1.0 |
| MidFag |flare_gun_fire.ogg, source: https://opengameart.org/content/steampiston |CC-BY-3.0 |