The Ships Mod is a pretty impressive mod as it allows you, the player, to craft your very own ships from default Minecraft blocks!
To start building your own ship, you first need a ship block, and there are 7 different kinds of ship blocks, each one allowing you to create a bigger and bigger ship, starting from Tiny Ship (or more likely a raft) and then moving on up to the huge Epic Ships, which can be consist of up to 10.000 blocks. You then place said block somewhere with no other interfering blocks, preferably on water (you might have to build a tower from the ocean floor, place the ship block, then remove the tower to properly place it), then start building your ship around the ship block.
Important: the Ships Mod requires Minecraft Forge.
Here is a list of all the ships, as well as accompanying tools:
Tiny Ship:
Can consist of up to 20 blocks, and requires a paddle to sail.
Small Ship:
Can consist of up to 200 blocks, requires a helm and sail to be sailed, cannot be operated by just a paddle.
Medium Ship:
Behaves exactly like the Small Ship, but can consist of up to 400 blocks.
Large Ship:
Has a cap of 1.000 blocks, so now the ships are starting to become big!
Huge Ship:
Can consist of up to 2.000 blocks.
Gigantic Ship:
Has a limit of 4.000 blocks.
Epic Ship:
The biggest ship available, and can be extremely huge, with a limit of 10.000 blocks.
Paddle:
Used to paddle the tiny ship, simply use it one the ship to sail.
Helm:
Required to control and steer ships larger than the Tiny Ship, but you also require sails. Sails are just any kind of wool blocks that are exposed to open air, the more sails, the faster your ship is.
Berth:
Similar to beds, but as beds don’t work very well on the ships, the Berth saves the same function while ensuring you’ll respawn on your ship.
Ship Clipboard:
This allows you to make copies of ships. To do so, use the clipboard on a docked ship, its blueprint will then be copied to the clipboard. While you have a ship on a clipboard, you can paste it to onto websites with CTRL-V. While in creative mode, you can use the clipboard to paste ships into worlds by using it on empty water, however this won’t work in survival. For that, take a look at the Ship Projector. You can also copy ships to the clipboard by copying the encoded ship text from a website by using commands such as CTRL-C.
Ship Projector:
This nifty gadget allows you to project a blueprint of a ship onto the space over open water. This allows you to easily place the blocks required by the ships, and essentially recreate it by hand. To do it, simply copy a ship to the clipboard, then place a Ship Projector on a water block.
The ships function pretty well, and I didn’t encounter any issues while testing the mod, other than the ship misplacing blocks the first time I set sail, but simply docking and setting sail again fixed it. All in all, a grade A mod that adds a much missed feature to the game: proper ships.
How to install the Ships Mod for Minecraft:
- Download the mod.
- Important: Download and install Minecraft Forge.
- Open your Minecraft folder (in Windows: Start -> Run -> “%appdata%\.minecraft”).
- Copy the mod .jar file(s) you downloaded to the “mods” folder, found inside the .minecraft folder.
- Done! The Ships Mod should now be installed and ready for your ships, so get to building and have fun!
Here is a better look at the mod, as well as some more details about how it actually looks, check it out: