Introduction
Hello everyone! For the past few months, we’ve been working on a Minecraft datapack called Colourful Calibers. You may not have heard of it prior to now, so we’ll briefly explain what it is: Colourful Calibers is a datapack that adds a variety of decorated and fully animated weapons to Minecraft. We are currently adding various features and gimmicks to CC that’ll enhance your experience, including ADS, sliding, alt-firing, GUN WAIFUS, and, as of recently, the ability to craft the guns in Survival Mode.

Our very first development log will focus on our newly implemented crafting system!

Chapter 0 - Blank blueprints, folders and an outline of the system
Previously, the only way you were able to obtain the weapons was through entering commands. However, we’ve since implemented a way to craft the weapons, so that they are accessible without cheats, and obtainable in Survival mode.

For the crafting recipes, we've decided to take the floor crafting approach, which involves dropping the appropriate resources on the ground to craft the item you want. The crafted item will vary depending on which key item you've dropped as the basis for the system. For example, if you want to craft a certain part of the pistol, you'll have to drop the pistol blueprint first before laying down the materials.

We've divided the key items between blueprints and ammo folders: Blank blueprints will only consist of one singular weapon, whereas ammo folders will allow you to select between a group of ammunition blueprints depending on the strength of their calibers (ie. .45 ACP and 5.7x28mm for Light Ammo, 12 Gauge for Shotgun Ammo)

You start by obtaining a blank blueprint. This can be done by placing one paper and one blue dye in a crafting table. You can craft the ammo needed as well! To obtain the ammo blueprints, you need to put three paper, three blue dye, and one leather in a crafting table. The result is a folder filled with blueprints.
Chapter 1 - Weapon crafting system
Once you have your blank blueprint, you are able to select which weapon blueprint you want. You can go through the different options by pressing your ‘switch to left hand’ keybind (F) (left video). Keep in mind that there are some weapons that you need to collect lots of XP for. Once you get to your weapon blueprint of choice, you press your ‘drop item’ keybind (Q) to obtain the weapon blueprint you selected (right video).


Now that you have your weapon blueprint, you’ll have to obtain the materials needed to make the individual parts of your weapon. You drop your blueprint, then drop the required materials to obtain your weapon parts. Once you have all of your weapon parts, you drop your blueprint again, drop all of the parts on top of the blueprint, and you’ll be left with a complete weapon.

To easily demonstrate the whole process, here's a video of the pistol's construction in its entirety:


As expected, each gun will vary in its part count and material costs: There are earlier-game weapons such as the TRR8 (W-06) that only require some concrete and iron, but heavier weapons such as the M24 (W-04) require much more expensive materials such as diamonds and, worst of all, netherite.

The different crafting recipes for the guns can be found in this imgur gallery

Chapter 2 - Ammo crafting system
The process of getting the ammo you want is the same as the weapon blueprints: you press your ‘switch to left hand’ keybind to cycle through what category of ammo you want. These also require certain levels of XP as well, so keep that in mind.


Once you have your desired category selected, you press your ‘drop item’ keybind to obtain the blueprints. Here, you can cycle through the folder again to get the specific ammo you wish to craft.


Obtain the materials needed, drop them onto the folder, and you’ll be left with usable ammo for your gun!


With these blueprints, you’ll be able to craft guns, and shoot down hordes of mobs easily!


Closing words & future plans:
Over the next few months, we'll be working on finalising and polishing the first two sets of weapons before making our first public release on PMC and other adjacent platforms. By then, we'll be continuing to make more footage and blogs outlining the contents of the datapack, tutorials for installation and usage, as well as a couple of other fun stuff that might be worth showing! :)

Once more, thanks to everyone who's been following our development journey with Colourful Calibers, both new and old. We're more than happy to have all of you on board with our journey, and we're excited to show you all what we have to offer, both within CC as well as other projects under our name.


Thanks all! Have a wonderful day
- H & K