Reach-around ("Bedrock bridging") block placement for NeoForge 1.21.1 — place blocks in air gaps in front of, above, or below you, even when you're not looking directly at a solid face. Works as a plain standalone bridging mod on its own; when Sable is also installed, it stays correct while standing on a moving physics contraption (a Create Aeronautics ship, plane, or any other sub-level in flight or motion) too.
- Bedrock-style reach-around placement, on any of the 6 axes
- A crosshair indicator shows when a gap-fill placement is available and which face it'll build against
- A world-space outline box shows exactly where the block will land
- Slabs placed into a gap correctly pick top or bottom half based on where you're looking, matching vanilla's own slab placement feel
- A toggle keybind (unbound by default — set it in Controls) to turn reach-around assist on/off
- Sable-aware: gap-fill placement keeps working correctly while riding a moving sub-level, without needing Sable installed at all for the base feature to work
- No hard dependency on Sable — install it and get sub-level support, or don't and just get an ordinary bridging mod
Requires NeoForge on Minecraft 1.21.1. Drop the -all.jar build (the one
containing the embedded sable-companion library) into your mods
folder. Sable itself is optional.
- Sub-level outline is the least battle-tested part of the mod. It follows the contraption's position and rotation through the sub-level's pose matrix, and it's held up in testing so far, but it's newer and more fragile than everything else here. If the box ever looks off (wrong spot, wrong angle) specifically while riding a sub-level, that's the first place to look. Placement and the crosshair icon don't depend on this, so they're unaffected either way.
- Toggle keybind syncs to the server over a small custom network payload, so it actually affects placement on a dedicated server and not just your local display. Works in testing; if multiplayer sync ever misbehaves, the payload handler's player lookup is the likely suspect.
- Non-slab, non-full-block shapes (stairs, etc.) get a full-block outline approximation. Placement itself is fine — vanilla handles the actual shape — the preview box just doesn't shrink to match.
- No vertical slab-combining (stacking a new slab onto an existing half-slab to form a double in one placement). Regular separate placement still works fine.
- Like the original Bridging Mod this one's inspired by: reach-around placement is a real gameplay advantage, so it's best suited to singleplayer or servers where everyone's fine with it being in use.
This mod builds on the work of two other projects:
- ryanhcode/sable-companion provides the stable, optional-dependency API used for Sable sub-level-awareness.
- squeeglii/BridgingMod (the popular Bridging Mod) is the reference this mod's gap-fill search algorithm and crosshair indicator are adapted from, used under its MIT license. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for the full attribution and license text.
This mod was built collaboratively with Claude (Anthropic's AI) through an extended series of implementation passes, code review, and real bug fixes found through actual in-game testing. See CHANGELOG.md for the full development history, kept as-is rather than cleaned up because it's genuinely useful context.
MIT — see LICENSE. Note that the credited third-party code above retains its own MIT license and attribution requirements; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.