Grapnel

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Grapnel adds one machine to Create: Aeronautics: a mounted launcher that fires a boarding hook on a rope.

This is not a hand-held grappling hook. There is no item to aim and no button to hold. It is a machine you bolt to a deck: it aims on Create rotation, fires on redstone, and winches on rotation again. Wire it up and your ship can catch, reel in and release another ship on its own — from a lever, a sequenced gearshift, or a full autopilot circuit — with nobody standing at the controls.

Put it on a deck, aim it, give it a redstone pulse. The hook flies out in a long arc with rope paying out behind it, bites into whatever it hits, and the two ships are now tied together by an actual rope — the same rope Aeronautics uses, with real physics on it. Run the winch and they get pulled together.

It is not a weapon. The hook passes straight through players and mobs. This is for boarding, docking, towing and mooring.

What you get

• A machine, not a gadget. Aiming, firing and winching are all machine inputs, so the whole thing can be automated end to end. Nothing here needs a player holding anything.
• A hook that really flies. It arcs out about 100–160 blocks, and you can watch the rope come off the drum behind it.
• A real rope, not a decoration. It sags, it swings, it drags both ships around, and it survives saving and reloading.
• It never snaps. Pull too hard and the winch simply stops reeling in and the rope creaks until the load eases — the same rule the Aeronautics rope winch plays by.

Using it

The launcher is one block tall with a turret on top. Each input has its own face, and the face tells you what it does:

Face	Marked	What it does
Left and right	blue dots	Rotation turns the turret left and right
Bottom	red dots	Rotation raises and lowers the barrel (−30° to +75°)
Back	green dots	Rotation runs the winch: rope in, rope out
Front	lever icon	Redstone fires the hook, and lets it go again

Redstone only works on the front face, so you can wire the rest of the machine right up against it. Clicking the launcher does nothing at all, which means levers, buttons and shafts go up against it without sneaking.

Hold the ponder key over the launcher in your inventory for the in-game guide.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1 with NeoForge 21.1+
• Create 6.0+
• Create: Aeronautics — it brings the physics engine and the rope system this mod plugs into

Recipe

iron sheet    tripwire hook   iron sheet
shaft         rope winch      shaft
andesite      brass casing    andesite

Building it yourself

Create: Aeronautics does not publish its rope module to a maven repository, so the build needs one file copied in by hand, once:

1. Open the Create: Aeronautics jar as a zip.
2. Copy META-INF/jarjar/dev.simulated_team.simulated.simulated-neoforge-*.jar into this project as local/libs/simulated-neoforge-1.21.1-1.3.1.jar.
3. Run ./gradlew build. The finished mod lands in build/libs/.

Bug reports

Open an issue: https://github.com/Argorice/Grapnel/issues — English or Russian, both are fine. A log file helps a lot.

License

Code is LGPL-3.0, see LICENSE.

The machine wears Create's own block textures, referenced at runtime rather than copied, so nothing from Create or Create: Aeronautics is redistributed here. The artwork in branding/ and the small in-game details are original. The lever icon on the front face comes from Create Big Cannons' cannon mount texture by the Cannoneers of Create, used under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.