Clumps

Clumps is a server-side mod that changes how experience orbs spawn, merge and are collected. Instead of many small orbs, nearby experience is combined into a single "clump" that keeps a breakdown of the value it holds. When a player touches the clump, the experience is first spent repairing damaged gear with Mending, and any remainder is given as ordinary experience. Clumps adds no items, blocks, mobs or structures, so its effect on play is limited to how experience behaves.

Overview

Clumps is a targeted rewrite of the vanilla experience orb entity. It is a performance and quality-of-life change: fewer orb entities exist at once, and pickup is resolved in one step rather than one orb at a time. The mod has no configuration file and no commands, screens or keybinds. Its behaviour applies to every world it is installed in, and it has no unlock or progression requirement.

Clumps requires NeoForge and Minecraft 1.21.1. It is needed on the server only; a client does not need the mod to join.

Content

Clumps adds no blocks, items, mobs, biomes, structures, recipes, loot tables, trades, advancements or enchantments. The only content it touches is the vanilla experience orb and the Mending enchantment, which it uses as an existing lookup rather than adding to.

Because there is no new content, there are no generated tables for this page. The experience sources in the pack, such as mob kills, mining and smelting, still produce experience orbs as in vanilla. Clumps changes what happens to those orbs after they spawn. Enchantments in the pack that alter Mending-style repair are honoured by Clumps (see Enchantments and Enchantment Descriptions for the enchantment system as a whole).

Mechanics

Spawn-time merging. When an experience orb is about to spawn, Clumps looks for any living orb inside a 1×1×1 box around the spawn point. If it finds one, the new value is added to that orb instead of creating a new entity, and the existing orb's age resets to 0, which extends its lifetime. Vanilla only merges orbs with a matching value bucket; Clumps merges with any living orb in the box.

Orb-to-orb merging. When two orbs merge, their values are combined per value, the surviving orb takes the lower of the two ages, and the other orb is removed. A clump can therefore hold many different values at once, which vanilla does not normally produce together.

Pickup. Touching a clump resets the player's pickup delay to 0, so there is no vanilla wait between touches. Each distinct value in the clump is processed as a group. For each orb in the group, the mod tries to repair one damaged item with Mending. The experience spent on repair is subtracted, and whatever is left is offered to the next damaged item. Any value that no item can use is given to the player as experience points, and the clump is removed.

Repair rate. A repaired item receives one point of durability for each point of experience spent, scaled by the item's experience repair ratio. The ratio is 1.0 for most items. Enchantment effects that modify repair from experience still apply.

Save data. A clump saves its per-value breakdown in the orb's data. A save written by Clumps and loaded without it keeps the correct total experience but loses the breakdown.

Changes to vanilla

Clumps changes the following player-visible behaviour of experience:

• Experience orbs merge with any nearby living orb, not only orbs of the same value. Fewer orb entities are present at once.
• Orb lifetime differs from vanilla. A merge resets the age of the surviving orb, so a clump can persist longer than a single orb would.
• Pickup pays out the whole clump on touch, and the pickup delay between touches is removed.
• Mending-style repair runs once per orb in the clump, not once per orb value as vanilla does.

See Changes to Vanilla for the pack-wide list of vanilla changes.

In Fear Nightfall

Fear Nightfall installs Clumps with its default behaviour. The pack's change log (CHANGES.md) records no edits to this mod, and the mod has no configuration options to change. Clumps does not have a horror-specific role in the pack: its effects are the same in every biome and at every time of day.

Players who install other mods that change experience orbs, such as XP tweaks or pickup changes, may see conflicts. Clumps uses a higher mixin priority than the default, so it takes precedence when both mods alter the same orb methods. Pack authors should test experience-related changes after adding such a mod.