Lightning Experiments

My First Challenge

My first challenge in setting this all up was figuring out how to actually strike lightning down on a location. As all programmers know, the internet is your best friend. Trust me, I used it a lot! Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of data available on this, and I wasn’t about to start decompiling mods to figure this out. Instead, I tried around figuring out how to summon the LightningEntity.

The Code

I knew I needed to create an instance of the entity, which I ran with the code:

Entity lightning = new

However, this does not include any information that it requires, so I then added:

Entity lightning = new net.minecraft.entity.LightningEntity(EntityType.LIGHTNING_BOLT, (ServerWorld) world);

The LightningEntity requires the current world parsed through into it.

First Use Case

The first way I used this was for the Shocking Apple item.

As such, I needed to make sure this code ran on server only, and also struck down on the players location. I did this with this code below:

if (!world.isClient) {
            BlockPos pos = user.getBlockPos();
            Entity lightning = new net.minecraft.entity.LightningEntity(EntityType.LIGHTNING_BOLT, (ServerWorld) world);
            lightning.refreshPositionAfterTeleport(pos.getX(), pos.getY(), pos.getZ());
            ((ServerWorld) world).spawnEntity(lightning);
        }

In total, the class looked like the below:

package dev.mars455.lightning;

import net.minecraft.entity.Entity;
import net.minecraft.entity.EntityType;
import net.minecraft.entity.LivingEntity;
import net.minecraft.item.Item;
import net.minecraft.item.ItemStack;
import net.minecraft.server.world.ServerWorld;
import net.minecraft.util.math.BlockPos;
import net.minecraft.world.World;

public class ShockingAppleItem extends Item {
    public ShockingAppleItem(Settings settings) {
        super(settings);
    }

    @Override
    public ItemStack finishUsing(ItemStack stack, World world, LivingEntity user) {
        if (!world.isClient) {
            BlockPos pos = user.getBlockPos();
            Entity lightning = new net.minecraft.entity.LightningEntity(EntityType.LIGHTNING_BOLT, (ServerWorld) world);
            lightning.refreshPositionAfterTeleport(pos.getX(), pos.getY(), pos.getZ());
            ((ServerWorld) world).spawnEntity(lightning);
        }
        return super.finishUsing(stack, world, user);
    }

Hopefully this helps if anyone has similar questions, but this was some of the most fun I have had programming this mod so far!