This system is not original to Fixed by Design. It is a port of Aileron by ryanhcode and Violunae, and of its Fabric rewrite Eleron by sindercube.
They worked out the hard part: that the fix for rocket flight is not to nerf rockets but to move the cost onto the ground, where you can build against it. Campfires as launch pads, hearth geometry as a power budget, updraft columns as infrastructure. That design is theirs, and it is close to perfect.
What Fixed by Design adds is the tie-in with the rest of the pack: the Smokestack and Cloudskipper enchantments live inside this project's enchantment slot budget, and the corridors you build interact with the rail and world progression systems.
Exploration Reloaded is licensed LGPL-3.0-only specifically so it can carry that code. Both upstream mods are worth installing on their own.
Using a firework rocket while gliding consumes the rocket and produces no thrust. It emits campfire-signal smoke for five seconds and goes on cooldown. The item is not removed from the game, it simply stopped being an engine.
Flight now starts and refuels at campfires.
Crouch on any lit campfire while wearing an elytra. You take no fire damage in the smoke column. After one charge interval the launch arms; release sneak and you are thrown upward, wings forced open, with a burn of directional thrust.
How hard you are thrown depends on the hearth you built.
Every one of the eight blocks orthogonally or diagonally adjacent to the campfire that is itself an updraft block adds one power. A hay bale underneath, making it a signal fire, adds four.
| Hearth | Power | Launch | Burn |
|---|
| Lone campfire | 0 | 0.45 | 40 ticks |
| 3x3 signal hearth | 12 | 1.65 | 100 ticks |
A campfire with any hearth power always emits the tall signal column, hay bale or not, and adds extra visible plumes as it grows. A good launch pad is visible from a distance, which is the point: your infrastructure becomes landmarks.
While the burn is active, your velocity is pulled toward wherever you are looking, converging on roughly 1.5 blocks per tick. Thrust follows your view rather than your momentum, so a launch is a commitment to a direction.
While gliding, the game scans downward up to 38 blocks. Pass over a lit updraft block and you gain lift, scaled by the hearth's range and your distance from it, capped at a total upward speed of 1.0.
A line of campfires along a route is a flight corridor. This is the system that replaces holding right click: you build the sky roads first, then you fly them.
Two elytra enchantments, mutually exclusive.
Smokestack I to III lets you bank one campfire charge per level while crouched in the smoke. In the air, the boost key spends one charge for a fifteen-tick directional dash. You need at least ten ticks of gliding first, and there is a sixty-tick cooldown between dashes. Charges persist across saves, and drop to zero if you stand around on the ground.
Cloudskipper I to III takes the other approach: above y=100 it returns part of the drag your glide is losing instead of adding thrust, saturating around y=230. It rewards flying high rather than flying hard.
A dedicated key, X by default, folds your wings instantly mid-air. The boost key defaults to Space and can be rebound if another mod already uses jump.
| Gamerule | Default | Effect |
|---|
firework_boosts_flight | false | Set true to restore vanilla rocket propulsion |
campfire_updrafts | true | Set false to disable in-air lift columns |
smokestack_charge_ticks | 30 | Ticks of crouching per charge |
