What’s better than brandishing a sword? Easy – brandishing two. Though Minecraft is a deep game, its combat isn’t so complex, a fact that may turn off some more action-oriented gamers. Luckily for us, there’s a Minecraft account generator to fix everything. If ‘Mine & Blade’ sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a shameless play on the popular ‘Mount and Blade,’ a game about, well, mounts and blades. While mounted combat isn’t actually a thing in this mod, its other additions more than makeup for this. With the addition of dual-wielding, shields, new weapon classes, and arrow types, you’re going to have fun simply bashing things for a good few weeks.
The first feature of Mine and Blade, as I’ve already mentioned, is the ability to dual-wield weapons. Upon installing the mod, you will now be able to switch between regular Minecraft mode and ‘battle mode’ by pressing ‘r’ (by default). This will remove crafting materials and other non-deadly items from your hands, allowing you to whip out your battle gear. Your battle gear is a unique inventory screen that allows you to equip three different sets of weapons (sword+sword, spear+shield, bow+quiver, etc.). Pressing the battle button again will return you to your mundane crafting inventory.
The most extensive area revamped by this mod is the melee weapons, and for good reason. As fun as swords splash potions are, Minecraft’s default weapon pool gets boring pretty quickly. This mod adds a slew of new options that seem as if they should have been included from the beginning – from maces to battle-axes, the new weapons are balanced and intuitive. Mine and Blade: Battlegear 2 adds four new melee weapon types: maces, daggers, spears, and battle-axes. Also included for those who are melee-inclined are the shield and knight armor.
So maybe you never vibed with the whole Conan the Barbarian thing, and dual-wielding isn’t your thing. Even if that’s the case, don’t discount this mod yet. Explosive arrows, shield bashes, and a hunger-independent stamina system make this a multi-faceted addition to any Minecraft game, be it vanilla or thoroughly modded. Honestly, the arrows alone are enough to make this worthwhile – there’s nothing quite so cool as enchanted arrowheads.
With Mine and Blade, you are able to equip a quiver and select from it one of several different types of arrows: explosive, ender, flaming, piercing, poison, mystery, and leech. Ender arrows teleport you to where the arrow lands (at the cost of some life), leech arrows steal you some health with each hit, mystery arrows do mysterious things, and the explosive, poison and flaming arrows all seem rather self-explanatory, though no less awesome.
If you’re an aficionado of action, I can only assume that you’ve already parsed through all this information, located the mod, downloaded and installed it, and then proceeded to your back yard to punch holes through blocks of concrete. In that case, good on you. For those who haven’t yet started down this particular warpath, I’d highly recommend you jump on it and fill those fists with glorious steel.
