Duelcraft

Duelcraft

Read the swing. Parry it. Riposte.

Duelcraft brings Souls-like combat to Minecraft. Swords, axes, spears, hammers, dual blades, sword and shield and your bare fists each get a real moveset: light and heavy strings that branch, charge attacks, rolls with invulnerability frames, guarding, parries and ripostes, posture and executions, and a lock-on camera. The mobs fight back with movesets of their own. Every hit follows the blade’s real path and lands with weight.

New to it? You don’t need a wiki. Every player gets the Duelcraft Guide on their first join: a book that teaches the whole system a page at a time, with short clips filmed in the game.

Learn it in game: the Duelcraft Guide

• 52 pages in 10 chapters: the screen, stamina, attacking, guarding and parries, rolls and perfect dodges, lock-on, breaking enemies, reading enemies, style and mastery, every weapon, and the trials.
• Most pages open with a clip showing the move, with captions and the keys pressed. Pause it with a click, or slow it to a quarter speed. Other pages show a picture with labels.
• Keys are shown as you have them bound. Unread pages carry a gold dot, and the book opens where you left off.
• Lost it? Craft another from a book and a stick, type /fightguide, or press Guide in the move list.

Fight with a moveset

• Press R to enter combat mode. Tap attack for a light attack, hold it for a heavy one.
• Every weapon has a combo tree: L L L L, L H and L L H are different moves. Press J to see the move list of the weapon in your hand.
• Pause combos, charge attacks with a perfect release, launchers and air strings, and attacks out of a sprint, a jump, a roll or a backstep.
• Kick (V) to break a raised guard.
• Perfect Strike: press the next attack right as your hit lands. It deals 2.5× damage and puts you in the zone.
• Moves flow into each other’s motion, and a landed hit freezes both fighters for a moment, fighting-game style.

Seven ways to fight

• Sword: fast and balanced, with the most complete tree.
• Axe: heavy swings that keep going through hits.
• Fists: quick strings, uppercuts and a haymaker.
• Spear (the trident in combat mode): the longest thrusts, a piercing lunge and a pole vault.
• Hammer (the mace): crushing blows and a charged ground pound. Slams from a fall keep the mace’s smash.
• Dual blades (a sword in each hand): alternating cuts, scissor crosses and twin spins.
• Sword and shield (a shield in the off hand): a wider guard, Shield Bash and Shield Counter.

Each weapon has its own weapon art, a signature move paid from a gauge that fills as you fight: Tempest, Earthsplitter, Hundred Fists, Piercing Rush and more.

Defend with timing

• Roll and backstep (Left Alt) with invulnerability frames. Locked on, you roll to either side or back, facing your target. Dodge at the last moment for a perfect dodge: nearby enemies slow down, and a counter opens.
• Guard with right click. Raise it just as a hit lands to parry: the attacker reels, and your next blow is a riposte for 2.5× damage. Parry blow after blow for a deflect chain.
• Stamina pays for attacks, dodges, blocking and sprinting. Block with an empty bar and your guard breaks.
• Second Wind: dodge or guard right after a finisher lands to win back stamina.

Break your enemies

• Posture: every hit fills a bar under the enemy’s health. When it’s full, the enemy kneels, open to an execution.
• Backstabs: a heavy attack from behind on an enemy that hasn’t noticed you.
• Launches and juggles: throw an enemy into the air, jump after it and keep it up there. Spike it into the floor, or knock it flat. Big enemies only reel, and the largest shrug it off.

Enemies that fight back

• Zombies, husks, skeletons, strays, wither skeletons, drowned, spiders, endermen, vindicators, iron golems, ravagers and more have movesets of their own: strings, feints, and answers to your swings.
• They take turns: only a few attack you at once, and the rest circle and wait.
• Read the glints. A white glint is a strong blow your guard can take. A red glint is a perilous attack: jump the sweep, dodge the grab, roll into the thrust.
• Wither skeletons guard and can parry you. A kick breaks it.
• Elites come with an affix (Brutal, Swift, Juggernaut, Duelist, Shieldbearer, Berserker), tougher and with better loot.
• Four difficulties: Story, Warrior, Souls and Nightmare.

Grow with your weapons

• Style meter: a rank from D to SSS for fighting with variety. Repeating the same move earns less, and getting hit costs two ranks. A results card closes each fight, and its best rank pays experience.
• Weapon mastery: each weapon class levels from 1 to 10. Levels unlock bonus combo branches and new trail colours.

Trials and a boss

• The Trial Altar: fight the Proving Grounds, waves of enemies graded by your style.
• The Hollow Warlord: an empty suit of plate with a greatsword and two phases. Clear the Proving Grounds to wake it.
• The dojo book: 22 combo trials that teach each weapon’s routes.
• The training dummy: hit numbers, the running combo and a posture bar. Switch it to sparring and it swings back, so you can drill parries.

Hits with weight

• Hits follow the blade: a frontal swing never hits what’s behind you, but spins do.
• Spacing: a lunge closes on your target and stops where the blow lands instead of running you into it, and chases a target that walks off.
• Impact: a hit freeze on both fighters, a slash mark where the blade cuts, a quick flash on the struck body, metal sparks off armour and a bright burst on a parry, weapon trails on the cut, and a camera kick along the blow. Blood is an option.
• Sound: each kind of weapon swings with its own whoosh and every blow lands with a hit. Parries clang, guards thud, and a resource pack can replace any of it.
• Fair online: your blow freezes and sounds the moment it lands on your screen, it lands on what you saw, and parries and dodges you time off your screen count.
• A slow-motion finish when your blow fells the last enemy of a fight.
• Lock-on (middle mouse) and an over-the-shoulder camera in third person, over either shoulder (O swaps it), that frames you and your target when locked on.

Animated on a real skeleton

Your character bends at the elbows, knees and spine. Your skin, its outer layer, your armour and held items follow every pose. In combat mode you get full-body walk, strafe, run and jump cycles. Out of a fight, you carry your weapon at ease while you walk. First-person animations too.

Plays well with vanilla

Combat mode only takes over the mouse while you hold a weapon with a moveset. With a pickaxe, blocks or food in hand, everything works like vanilla, so you can still mine and build. Food or a bow in your off hand keeps its right click. Away from a fight, right click still talks to villagers and places blocks, and left click digs.

For modpacks and mod makers

• Movesets are data-pack JSON, for weapons and for mobs. Give a modded weapon its own moveset, or tag it #mcfightmod:daggers or #mcfightmod:greatswords to use the built-in dagger and greatsword movesets.
• Config: difficulty, elites, attack turns, mastery, stamina, dodges, the parry window, posture and more live in a server config synced to clients. Camera, effects and HUD settings live in a client config, and a HUD editor lets each player drag and size the gauges.
• An API lets other mods soft-depend on Duelcraft: events for hits, parries, staggers, hit freeze, executions and reactions, plus warning glints, perilous attacks and guards for their own enemies. DanMachi Craft uses it: its monsters and foes can be parried, executed and juggled, its big monsters glint before their strongest attacks, its human foes raise their guard, and its weapons have movesets of their own.

Controls

All keys can be changed under Controls → Duelcraft.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.259 or newer
• Install it on both the client and the server.
• Duelcraft changes how the player is drawn and how melee works. Don’t run it alongside another combat overhaul: the game won’t start with Epic Fight, and warns about Better Combat.