Orbital Wither Cannons

Orbital Wither Cannon

Call down an orbital bombardment of blue wither skulls anywhere you can see.


If you've been watching the Unstable SMP — especially spokeishere's POV — you've seen it: the sky opens up and a wall of wither skulls comes screaming down onto somebody's base. That's the mechanic this addon recreates, rebuilt from the ground up as a fully configurable Bedrock behavior pack you can drop into your own world.


You look at a spot. You use the rod. Hundreds of dangerous blue wither skulls spawn in a dome high above the target and rain down on it. No file editing, no commands to memorize mid-fight — just aim and fire.

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What it actually does

Using a cannon rod fires an orbital shot:

1. 1. Targeting — The pack raycasts from your eyes up to 400 blocks along your view direction. Whatever block you're looking at becomes the impact point. If you're aiming at open sky, the target is placed 30 blocks in front of you instead, so the cannon always fires somewhere.

1. 1. Altitude — The strike origin is raised above the target by the configured spawn height (default 50 blocks), so the volley comes down from above.

1. 1. The dome — Wither skulls are spawned across the lower cap of a sphere around that origin. Positions use a golden-angle (Fibonacci) distribution, so the skulls spread evenly instead of clumping, with a small random jitter so no two shots look identical.

1. 1. Launch — Each skull gets a radial impulse pointing away from the center of the dome and is rotated to face the direction it's travelling. The result is a wide, expanding curtain of skulls sweeping down onto the target area.

1. 1. Barrage — By default the cannon fires 10 volleys, 5 seconds apart, from a single rod use. Each volley spawns in batches across multiple ticks instead of all at once, which keeps the game from locking up.

1. 1. Cleanup — A few seconds after each volley, the pack sweeps the area and removes junk drops and XP orbs left behind by the destruction (wither roses, cobblestone, dirt, gravel, saplings, mob drops and so on). On by default, and can be turned off.

1. 1. The rod is consumed — One rod is removed from your stack per shot, with a break sound. One rod, one bombardment.
      
      

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How to use it

1. Install

Apply the behavior pack to your world. Requires Minecraft Bedrock 1.26.30 or newer.
(If the /orbital: commands don't appear, enable the Beta APIs experimental toggle in your world settings and reload.)

2. Give yourself admin

All of the pack's commands are admin-gated. Grant yourself the tag once:

/tag @s add admin

3. Get a cannon rod

/orbital:getrods wither_skull 5

This drops 5 trigger rods at your feet. The first argument is the cannon type (currently wither_skull), the second is how many you want. The rods are tagged internally, so an ordinary fishing rod will never fire the cannon by accident — only rods given by this command work.

4. Fire

Hold the rod, look at where you want the strike to land, and use the item. That's it. Step back and watch.

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Configuration

Open the in-game settings menu with:

/orbital:cannonconfig

Everything is edited through a form UI and saved to the world — no JSON editing, no resource pack fiddling, and settings persist across sessions.

Setting	Default	What it controls
Wither Skull Shot Name	Wither Skull Shot	Display name given to newly created cannon rods
Spawned Skulls Count	1000	Skulls per volley
Skull Hemisphere Radius	15	Radius of the dome the skulls spawn on
Skull Hemisphere Cap Fraction	0.33	How much of the sphere's lower cap is used — smaller means a tighter, more focused strike
Skull Speed	1	Outward launch speed of each skull
Spawn Height	50	How far above the target the dome is placed
Clear Junk Items	true	Auto-cleanup of debris drops and XP orbs after each volley
Skull Shot Continuous Fire Enabled	true	Whether one rod fires a barrage or a single volley
Skull Shots Fired Continuously	10	Number of volleys in a barrage
Continuous Skull Shots Time Delay	5	Seconds between volleys
Skull Position Offset	0.5	Random spawn jitter, for a less uniform look
Skulls Spawned Per Tick	250	Spawn batch size — lower this if you get lag spikes

Reset a single config back to defaults:

/orbital:resetconfig orbital:orbital_config

Reset everything:

/orbital:resetallconfigs

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Command reference

Command	Description
/orbital:getrods <type> <count>	Drops the specified number of cannon trigger rods at your location
/orbital:cannonconfig	Opens the configuration menu
/orbital:resetconfig <config>	Resets one configuration to its defaults
/orbital:resetallconfigs	Resets every configuration to its defaults

All commands require the admin tag.

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Performance notes

This pack is designed to spawn a very large number of entities on purpose. The defaults — 1000 skulls per volley across 10 volleys — are deliberately excessive, because that's the entire point of an orbital cannon. On lower-end devices, servers, or with lots of players nearby, you'll want to tune it down:

• • Drop Spawned Skulls Count to 200–400

• • Drop Skulls Spawned Per Tick to 50–100

• • Reduce Skull Shots Fired Continuously, or turn continuous fire off entirely

Fire it somewhere you don't mind flattening. It will destroy terrain, and it will kill you if you're standing in it.

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Compatibility

The pack defines a custom behavior for minecraft:wither_skull_dangerous. Any other addon that also overrides that same entity will conflict — one of the two will win depending on load order. Vanilla withers in your world will use this pack's skull behavior while it's applied.

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Original work

Every line of this addon was written from scratch by sparklyy1.

• • No code was copied, lifted, or reused from any other addon, pack, or creator.

• • Nothing here is decompiled, extracted, or repackaged from someone else's project.

• • No paid, leaked, or private content is included.

• • It's built entirely on Mojang's official Minecraft Scripting API (@minecraft/server and @minecraft/server-ui) and standard Bedrock behavior pack JSON — the public, documented tools any creator has access to.

• • The command system, configuration system, targeting math, spherical distribution, and cleanup logic are all my own implementations.

The Unstable SMP is the inspiration for the concept, not the source of the code. This is my own recreation of the mechanic — none of the SMP's code, assets, or files were used, and this addon is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Unstable SMP, spokeishere, or any of its members or creators.


If you want to use any part of this in your own project, please ask first and credit sparklyy1. Don't reupload the pack to other sites or bundle it into a paid product.


Bug reports, suggestions, questions, and feature ideas are genuinely welcome — leave them in the Discord Server