McHeli-CE-port-unoff

McHeli CE (26.2 Port)

Helicopters, jets, tanks and warships for Minecraft 26.2 on NeoForge. An unofficial community port of McHeli: Community Edition, the classic military vehicle mod, rebuilt for the modern game with AI wingmen, airfield missions, aircraft that tear apart and burn, realistic lighting and a full set of new effects.

Unofficial port. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Warfactory, the McHeli CE developers or the original McHeli authors. The upstream team has said it won’t port McHeli CE to other versions, so please report problems with this port on its issue tracker, not upstream.

Vehicles

Over 110 stock vehicles, each with its original model, animated rotors, gear, flaps and turrets, and the McHeli HUD.

• 34 helicopters: AH-64D Apache, AH-1Z, Mi-24, Ka-52, Mi-28, UH-1, CH-47, MH-60, NH90 and many more. Hover mode, gunner mode, folding rotor blades, searchlights, hatches, and rappelling ropes on helicopters with rope hooks.
• 46 planes: F-22A, F-35A/B/C, F-15E, F/A-18F, F-14D, Su-33, Su-47, MiG-29, A-10, B-2A, B-29, AC-130, C-5, P-51D, A6M2, seaplanes and more. Retractable gear, swing and folding wings, and VTOL on the F-35B, Harrier and MV-22.
• 12 tanks and cars: M1A2 Abrams, T-90, Merkava Mk4, KV-2, Centauro, M1129 and others. Turrets aim independently of the hull, hulls tilt with the terrain and climb steps, and heavy tanks crush trees, fences and walls by weight.
• 5 ships, from the Zodiac to the Project 1204 gunboat, with buoyancy, wakes and crew weapons per seat.
• 18 placed guns and launchers, including AA guns, naval guns, SAM sites, Phalanx-style CIWS and an ammo box.
• UAVs and drones controlled from a UAV station, portable controller or hand-held tablet, out to 5,000 blocks, with the area around the drone kept loaded while you fly it.

Weapons and combat

• Every upstream weapon type: machine guns and cannons, rockets, air-to-air, anti-tank and air-to-surface missiles, TV-guided missiles you steer from the missile’s own camera, laser-guided weapons, bombs with a CCIP aiming marker, cluster bombs, mines, torpedoes, railguns, smoke trails and close air support strafing runs.
• Lock-on with seekers that flares and chaff can decoy, radar notching, active protection systems, ECM jammers, a missile warning, radar and BVR scopes, and a GPS target panel.
• Gunner cameras with zoom, night vision and thermal vision.
• Hand-held weapons: the FIM-92 Stinger and FGM-148 Javelin (with top attack), the GLTD target designator that calls in A-10 strafing runs, a laser rangefinder for team spotting, grenades and smoke grenades, and a mine defuser.
• Component damage: engines, rotors and fuel tanks have their own health. A jet with one engine out limps home on half power, a helicopter with a dead rotor autorotates, a holed tank leaks fuel, and the HUD shows which parts are hurt.
• Crew roles: pilot, gunner, loader, commander and passenger seats. A loader speeds up reloads and a commander can mark targets for the whole crew.
• Weather and night matter: rain gusts aircraft, snow above the clouds ices them, storms shorten radar and heat seeker range, and lightning can blank your radar.
• Fuel, ammunition and repairs: fuel cans, fuel trucks, an ammo cart, a wrench, and a new Repair Pad that repairs, refuels and rearms parked vehicles.

NPC wingmen, airfields and missions

• Wingmen: take nearby empty aircraft as wingmen from the Wingman Panel (Numpad 0). They fly formation behind you, copy your landing gear and attack on your orders with the weapon type you pick.
• NPC gunners: seat an AI gunner in any weapon seat. It leads its target, fires and uses flares, chaff and APS against incoming missiles.
• Smart AI pilots: they choose the right weapon for each target, lead moving targets, drop bombs where they will land, fly strafing passes, climb before hills, dodge missiles with decoys and hard turns, and head home when damaged. Three difficulty levels.
• Marker blocks and airfields: lay out a base with runways, parking spots, taxi waypoints and helipads. Marker screens explain each type and catch duplicate IDs, and the base screen builds taxi routes in numbered steps.
• Missions: send aircraft from a base on CAP, CAS, strike, escort, recon or ferry missions. They taxi out, take off, fight in the target area, then return, land and park. Helicopters and VTOL jets use helipads. Recall sends missions home early, and the Mission Planner (/wingman gui) builds custom routes.
• NPC battles: AI gunners, wingmen and mission aircraft of different teams fight each other.

Dynamic part breakaway

Planes come apart under fire. Wings tear off along their whole chord and tails shear away, with a burst of sparks, torn metal and flame. Each piece then falls with real rigid-body motion: wings fold back at the root before letting go, flutter and glide down like a strip of paper, cartwheel when they hit the ground, and slide to rest flat. A fire-to-smoke trail follows the falling piece and smoulders where it lands. Torn sections keep their paint and are sealed with a dark inner lining, so you never see the sky through a stump. A plane that loses a wing can keep flying with a smoking, sparking stump.

Realistic crash wrecks

A destroyed aircraft no longer just vanishes. Its paint chars outward from the fire with embers glowing in the seams, its nose crumples, its canopy shatters and its gear is torn off. It burns in a pool of fuel under black smoke, leaves a burn scar, a skid groove and a field of charred debris along its path, then settles on the ground and stays for 10 minutes (configurable, or clear wrecks with /mcheli clearwrecks). Wrecks rest on the surface instead of sinking into their own crater.

Lighting

• Realistic vehicle lighting: vehicles are lit by where the sun or moon really is, warm and low at dusk, cool and faint by moonlight, flatter in the rain, with a soft glint on their panels.
• Fire light: explosions, muzzle flashes, burning wrecks and flares light up nearby vehicles, mobs and players, and the ground around them.
• Light probes across the airframe, so a bomber half inside a hangar is dark inside and lit outside.
• Night flying: navigation lights, strobes, glowing cockpit surfaces and landing lights that light the ground below.
• Client-only and never changes the world’s block light.

New effects for OpenGL and Vulkan

The whole effects layer was rebuilt and runs on both OpenGL and Vulkan, with adaptive detail that holds your frame rate.

• Layered explosions with a white-hot flash, rolling fire, rising billows of smoke, material-coloured dust and debris, ground flashes and craters, and distance-delayed sound.
• Bright tracers, missile and rocket smoke trails, engine heat haze, turbine exhaust and rotor wash that sweeps dust and water.
• Altitude contrails, wingtip vapour in wet turns, transonic vapour cones and sonic booms on flypasts.
• Doppler flyby audio, touchdown puffs and gear compression on landing, tread and tyre marks, and cockpit instruments with rain on closed canopies.
• Bullet chips, scorch marks, cracked glass, loose panels, oil drips and engine smoke that build up on damaged vehicles and fade as you repair them.
• Liveries and markings: switch an aircraft’s livery from its menu, and give the F-35A, F-15E and A-10 nose numbers, insignia and weathering.
• An effects test range (ESC → MC Heli Effects → Test range) to fire real weapons at different surfaces and lighting.
• Prefer the original look? Set effects.effectQuality = CLASSIC.

NTM Next bomb integration (optional)

With NTM Next installed, 14 stock planes carry NTM bombs after their own weapons:

Bomb bays open for them on the B-29, B-2A, F-35A and X-47B. Addon weapons can also use NTM’s fire, mist, chemical, mini-nuke, nuke and VNT payloads. Without NTM Next the bombs are simply hidden.

Multiplayer

• Works on dedicated servers and in single player. The pilot’s client simulates its vehicle for smooth flying, or servers can switch to server-side movement.
• Lag compensation: your gun rounds hit a fast jet where you saw it, up to 250 ms back.
• Smooth interpolation for fast vehicles and missiles, and vehicles drawn up to 1,200 blocks away, past your view distance.
• Server checks on weapon fire catch impossible shots, with an operator command to review them.
• Teams: a team scoreboard (hold L) and the Multiplay Manager (M) for PvP, team shuffles and new teams. Players can join and leave teams themselves when the server allows it. Team spotting markers show what your teammates have found.
• Operator commands under /mcheli and wingman commands under /wingman, with per-command permissions.

Content and addons

• Loads all McHeli CE content, in both YAML and the legacy TXT format, including community addon packs. Drop packs into mcheli_addons/.
• Addons can add vehicles, weapons, HUDs, recipes, camera positions, damage zones, crew roles, lamps and NTM payloads.
• A Drafting Table browses every recipe with a rotating 3D model preview. JEI support is optional.
• Fluid and energy integration with other mods: pipes can fill fuel tanks, and the Aircraft Charger takes NeoForge energy for electric vehicles.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.2 and NeoForge 26.2
• Java 25
• Optional: Just Enough Items (recipe lookup), NTM Next 1.0.3 (nuclear and chemical bombs)
• Clients and servers must run the same build of the mod.

Good to know

• This is a work-in-progress port. Worlds and items from 1.12.2 McHeli don’t carry over.
• Stock vehicles have no crafting recipes, as in the original content. Get them from the creative tabs, commands or addon packs that add recipes.
• On Vulkan with the current NeoForge build, set earlyWindowControl = false in config/fml.toml. If you use NTM Next on Mesa’s software Vulkan driver, use OpenGL, because NTM’s renderer can crash there.
• A full player guide covers every key, vehicle, weapon and setting.

Credits and licence

• EMB4 and Murachiki27: the original McHeli
• RagexPrince683: MCHEL-O-Extended
• MrNorwood and MovBlock: McHeli: Community Edition (ported from version 1.5.1)
• TV90 for reforged content, H. M. Shrub and Jumboreal for texture work. McHeli Wingman began as a standalone addon and was merged into McHeli CE.
• thisisforfreeAI: the 26.2 NeoForge port

All vehicle models, textures and sounds come from the original content. Released under GPLv3, like upstream. Source code: github.com/thisisforfreeAI/26.2-port-of-mcheli-cm.