Crosshair Corsair

Client-side only. Nothing needs to be installed on the server.

Reacharound placement

Bridging in vanilla goes: look down at the side of the block under your feet, place, look back up,
step forward, look down again. The block you want is never in doubt; the looking is ceremony.

With this on, standing at an edge with blocks in hand and looking ahead places the next block out
in front of you. An outline shows where it will land before you click.

It only ever fires on a click vanilla would spend on nothing – the crosshair has to be on empty
air, the destination has to be replaceable, and there has to be a real block to place against.
Aim at anything and the reacharound is not consulted. Neither is it consulted when either hand
holds something with a use of its own: a bow, food, an ender pearl. Vanilla tries both hands on a
click, so a block in one of them never jumps the queue ahead of the other.

vertical does the same thing overhead: look well up and it extends the ceiling above you instead
of the floor below. Off by default, since it is the more surprising of the two.

Standing on a top slab or an upside-down stair, the next one lands in the top half too, so a
bridge of slabs stays level instead of dropping half a block a step. When the block would land
but the server would refuse it – a mob standing in the space, a torch with no wall – the outline
turns blockedColor and the click does nothing, rather than the outline vanishing and leaving
you to wonder. Where the block would land somewhere other than the outline says – scaffolding
climbs to the top of its own stack rather than sitting beside it – there is no reacharound at
all, because an outline that lies is worse than no outline.

There is a key to switch the whole thing off and on, unbound until you bind it, for the build
where every click near an edge is a block you did not mean to place. It flips enabled in the
file and says which way it went over the hotbar.

The crosshair

The crosshair says what a click would do. Nothing under it and nothing useful in hand, and it is
gone; look at a block and it is back; look at something you could use – a door, a chest, a
villager, a cow with wheat in your hand – and round brackets close around it; hold the right
tool for the block you are looking at and a dot sits in the middle.

What you hold changes its shape. A bow or crossbow draws a circle, a snowball a larger one, a
shield brackets, a block a square, and each of those only when it means something: a block shows
its square where it would actually go, a snowball its circle only with something to throw at.
When the click would be a reacharound, the crosshair says so instead: a line under it for a block
going at your feet, a caret for one going over your head.
Every state has its own shape and every shape can be changed: eighteen to choose from, and
cross is vanilla’s own so the default look is exactly vanilla’s.

A shield only takes the crosshair when it is the item a click would actually raise – in your main
hand, or in your off hand with the main one empty – so sword-and-board still reads as the sword.

The attack indicator stays where vanilla puts it, under the same option and on vanilla’s own
terms, and it keeps showing while the crosshair is hidden: it is about your weapon’s cooldown, not
about what is under the crosshair. Spectators get vanilla’s element untouched, and with F3’s
three-dimensional crosshair switched on this one stands down the same way vanilla’s does.

Pandorical’s synced blocks tell the client whether the server answers their click, and the
crosshair believes them – which is the one thing a client can know exactly about a block it has
never seen the inside of.

Selection box

Colour, opacity and line thickness for the block outline, or no outline at all. A blink, if you
want one: the opacity swings by blinkAlpha blinkSpeed times a second. And a break animation,
breakAnimation: as the block under the box is mined, the box can shrink to its centre, sink
down into the ground, or fade with alpha; none is vanilla’s fixed box. Drawing the box
through walls is not offered: this version keeps the line pipeline that would need behind private
doors.

Defaults reproduce vanilla exactly, so installing the mod does not change how anything looks until
you ask it to. High contrast block outline, if you have it switched on, always wins – that is an
accessibility setting and a cosmetic preference does not get to overrule it.

Config

Every setting but the colours is also in Pandorical’s mod menu, under Crosshair Corsair, where
Pandorical is installed: a change there is written to the file, and a change to the file shows up
there. The colours are hex strings, which the menu has no control for.

config/crosshair-corsair.json, written out in full whenever the file is missing anything – on
first run, and again after an update that adds settings, so a new knob never stays hidden in a
file you already have. It is re-read about once a second, so you can leave the game running while
you tune a colour.

{
  "selectionBox": {
    "enabled": true,
    "color": "#000000",
    "alpha": 102,
    "lineWidth": 0.0,
    "blinkAlpha": 0,
    "blinkSpeed": 1.0,
    "breakAnimation": "none"
  },
  "reacharound": {
    "enabled": true,
    "horizontal": true,
    "vertical": false,
    "showGhost": true,
    "ghostColor": "#FFFFFF",
    "ghostAlpha": 120,
    "blockedColor": "#FF5555"
  },
  "crosshair": {
    "enabled": true,
    "hideWhenIdle": true,
    "thirdPerson": false,
    "onBlock": true,
    "onInteractableBlock": true,
    "onEntity": true,
    "holdingTool": "always",
    "correctToolDot": true,
    "holdingMeleeWeapon": true,
    "meleeOnlyOnEntity": false,
    "holdingRangedWeapon": "always",
    "holdingThrowable": "interactable",
    "holdingShield": true,
    "holdingBlock": "interactable",
    "holdingBlockInOffhand": true,
    "holdingUsableItem": "interactable",
    "usableBrackets": true,
    "overrideColor": false,
    "color": "#FFFFFF",
    "blend": true,
    "styles": {
      "regular": "cross",
      "onBlock": "cross",
      "onInteractableBlock": "cross",
      "onEntity": "cross_open",
      "holdingTool": "cross",
      "holdingMeleeWeapon": "cross",
      "holdingRangedWeapon": "circle",
      "holdingThrowable": "circle_large",
      "holdingShield": "brackets",
      "holdingBlock": "square",
      "holdingUsableItem": "cross",
      "reacharoundFloor": "line_bottom",
      "reacharoundCeiling": "caret"
    }
  }
}

The held-item policies are words, and every one of them takes all four: always, targeting
(something under the crosshair), interactable (the item would do something to what is there),
never. interactable is always the narrower of the middle two – for a tool it means the right
tool for that block, not merely that a block is there. Styles
are cross, cross_open, cross_open_diagonal, cross_diagonal_small, circle,
circle_large, square, square_large, diamond, diamond_large, caret, dot,
brackets, brackets_top, brackets_bottom, brackets_round, lines, line_bottom. With
blend on the crosshair inverts what is behind it, as vanilla’s does; overrideColor paints it
color instead.

Colours are #RRGGBB, and #RGB shorthand is taken to mean what everyone means by it. Anything
else falls back to white and says so in the log rather than quietly picking a colour you did not
ask for.

lineWidth: 0 means “whatever the game would have used”, which is not a constant – vanilla scales
it with the window so the outline keeps the same apparent weight at any resolution. Naming a number
opts out of that scaling.

Delete the file to get the defaults back.