Blossom Blade — Guide

Finding the shrine

Shrines only generate inside Cherry Grove biomes, and they are spread out on purpose so that stumbling onto one feels like a find rather than a chore.

Because the shrine projects onto the surface heightmap it always sits flush on the terrain, usually on one of the grassy terraces between the cherry trees.

If you have cheats enabled in a test world you can jump straight to the nearest one:

/locate structure joshie:blossom_blade

That command reports the coordinates of the closest shrine, which is handy when you want to confirm the mod is installed and generating.

The Grove Sword

The blade sitting in the pedestal is a custom-named iron sword.

Sharpness V and Smite V together make it a very strong early-game weapon, and the extra attack speed means it recovers faster between swings than a normal iron sword. Against undead mobs — zombies, skeletons, husks, drowned, wither skeletons — the Smite bonus makes it hit far harder than its material would suggest.

It behaves like any other sword afterwards: it can be repaired on an anvil, renamed, further enchanted, and it takes durability damage normally.

Claiming the blade

The sword is displayed on an invisible armour stand, which is what lets it stand upright in the stone. Taking it works the same way as taking an item from any armour stand: sneak and interact with the blade with an empty hand and it comes free.

As soon as the sword leaves the pedestal the shrine cleans itself up — the invisible stand that was holding the blade disappears on the next tick, and the particles stop. What remains is the cherry plank platform and the empty deepslate pedestal, which reads nicely as a monument someone already looted.

Only the blade slot can be interacted with; the rest of the stand is locked, so nothing else can be placed on it.

Building your own shrine

The shrine is a normal structure, so a world with cheats can place one anywhere:

/place structure joshie:blossom_blade
/place structure joshie:blossom_blade ~ ~ ~

The first form places it at your position, the second at explicit coordinates. Because the structure projects onto the terrain heightmap it may settle a few blocks away from the exact spot you gave it.

To drop the raw building only, without letting the game adjust it to the terrain, use the template form instead:

/place template joshie:blossom_blade ~ ~ ~

This is useful for map makers who want the shrine as a decorative set piece.

Multiplayer and worlds

Shrines are part of world generation, so they appear in newly generated chunks. Adding the mod to an existing world will not put shrines into land you have already explored — you need to travel out to fresh cherry groves for them to show up.

On a server the mod must be installed on the server side, since that is where the structure is generated and where the shrine's upkeep runs. Clients do not need anything extra: the shrine is made of vanilla blocks and the sword is a vanilla item, so players who connect without the mod still see everything correctly.

Removing the mod from a world leaves the already-generated shrines standing as ordinary blocks; only the automatic clean-up of a looted stand stops working.

Tips

• Cherry groves usually sit high in mountain ranges — follow the pink canopy and scan the terraces below it.
• The enchantment particles are visible from a fair distance at night, so a night flight over a grove is a quick way to spot a shrine.
• The blade is a genuinely strong early weapon; if you find one before your first nether trip, it can carry you a long way.
• Grabbing the sword and leaving the pedestal makes a good landmark for a base built inside a grove.
• Anvil work applies normally, so combining the Grove Sword with a looting or unbreaking book turns it into a long-term weapon.