Silent Gear: Building Custom Tools and Armor
Silent Gear is a mod focused on customizable tools, weapons and armor — collectively "gear" — built from any material. This guide covers how it works.
Gear from any material
Gear can be made from any material vanilla uses for tools and armor, plus many more the mod adds, including new ores and metals. Each material contributes its own stats and traits, so the same tool performs differently depending on what you build it from.
Tool types
Beyond the vanilla set, Silent Gear adds useful tool types: the Paxel (pickaxe, axe and shovel in one), the Prospector Hammer (searches for nearby ores), the Hammer (an area-of-effect pickaxe), the Excavator (an AOE shovel), the Sickle and Mattock, and a Saw that fells whole trees.
Getting started
Craft gear from parts — a main part sets the core stats, with rods, tips and other components adding to it. Start with a simple material to learn the system, then combine better materials and traits as you progress. Because gear is fully customizable and upgradable, Silent Gear rewards mixing materials to build exactly the tool you want.
The two builds restructured their crafting
Silent Gear's version difference is not a matter of content added but of systems renamed and reorganised. Several categories exist on one build and not the other:
- 1.21.1 only — Alloy Making Metal (5 recipes), Alloy Making Gem (1), Tool Action (9)
- 1.20.1 only — Alloy Smelting (3), Compounding Metal (4), Compounding Gem (1), Crushing (4), Damage Item (7), Shaped Gear Crafting (6)
The alloying and compounding systems were rebuilt between versions, so a materials guide written for one line will name processes the other does not have.
What stays constant
The core is stable across both: Conversion at 50 recipes, Salvaging at 54, Smelting at 12, Blasting at 10, Woodcutting at 9 and Pressing Material at 1.
Gear Crafting (70 recipes on 1.21.1, 64 on 1.20.1) and Compound Part (43 and 48) are where tools are actually built.
Salvaging is half the mod
Between Salvaging (54) and Salvaging Gear (33), the mod devotes nearly 90 recipes to taking equipment apart. Nothing you build is a dead end — a tool you outgrow is material for the next one.
Smithing upgrades and coatings
Smithing Upgrade (34 recipes) and Smithing Coating (33) are the post-craft improvement systems, both present on either version.