The Shooting Star Mod: Download and Install Guide (26.3)

What The Shooting Star does

You pick a weapon with a key, aim, and right click with the remote. A short film takes over the camera, from your hand out into space and back, and then the strike hits the spot in your crosshair. The demo has four weapons.

SS-01 Railgun

A red laser from space marks the spot in your crosshair. Then the camera rides the laser up, past the Earth and Saturn, out of the Solar System and the Milky Way, to a railgun hanging past the edge of the galaxy. It fires back: a beam 200 blocks in radius that cuts the whole column of the world away, from the build limit down to the void.

SS-03 Gungnir

At Jupiter, a black needle a kilometer long is loaded into an accelerator ring, spun up seven laps and flung at the Earth. It’s faster than its own sound, so it strikes in silence, and only then does the boom arrive. The shock ring planes the land flat into a molten crater, and the needle stays standing in it, from the bottom of the world to the build limit. Only a netherite pickaxe can mine it.

SS-04 Seven Stars

The Big Dipper is projected onto your land, with the star Megrez on your crosshair: seven nodes, 1,440 blocks across. Out in Ursa Major, the seven real stars fire. Their shooting stars come down one by one, each digging its own crater and leaving a glowing star core, and then the lines of the constellation burn into the ground as trenches.

SS-05 Tesseract

A cage of light in all seven colors of the spectrum is painted over your crosshair, 640 blocks across, and splits the land into 64 cells. A machine of hypercubes comes through a wormhole, folds down through the fourth dimension and lands on the square. In four waves, every cell is torn out and lifted into the sky, and a wireframe tesseract is left hanging over the middle.

What I saw in my test

I tested version 1.4.3 on October 15, 2026, in creative, with default slider settings and nothing but Fabric API next to it. Every weapon went into a fresh copy of my world Valley of Mods, so the before and after shots use the same camera path.

• The timing: the Railgun strikes about 18 seconds after the laser marks the ground, Gungnir about 16 seconds after its mark. The films themselves ran between 28 and 37 seconds each.
• The films are about you: they start in third person, with your own skin holding the remote.
• The HUD: once the remote is in your inventory, the selected weapon shows in the bottom left corner. During a film, an overlay shows the target coordinates it locked on to and “[J] skip”.
• The damage is real: after the Railgun, the cherry grove next to our Block Archive was gone, down to the void (see the before and after shot). Our Block Archive survived only because every strike went into its own copy of the world.

In my 26.3 tier list, it landed in B tier, number 21 of 27: the railgun alone is worth seeing, but it’s a demo, and the remote needs six blocks of netherite.

Settings worth changing

• The skill menu (H): each weapon has sliders for Power (the size of the strike), Damage and Speed. Speed runs from 0.3x to 3x and covers the whole skill, film included. The Railgun’s radius goes from 10 to 1,500 blocks; Gungnir and Seven Stars start at Power 4x.
• Skip the film (J): handy once you’ve seen it.
• The keys: K selects SS-01, I selects SS-03, U selects SS-04 and Y selects SS-05. They’re normal keybinds, so you can change them under Options > Controls if they clash with another mod. Sneak and right click steps to the next skill.

Compatibility

• Versions and loaders: one Fabric file covers 26.3, 1.21.11, 1.21.1 and 1.20.1. Forge and NeoForge files exist only for 1.20.1 and 1.21.1.
• Requirements on Minecraft 26.3: Fabric Loader 0.15 or newer, Fabric API and Java 25.
• Multiplayer: install it on the server and on every client.
• Graphics: the films use heavy post-processing shaders, and the author recommends a decent graphics card. If your frame rate is low in general, my FPS mod test shows which mods actually help on 26.3.
• Other mods: the CurseForge page doesn’t mention Sodium, Iris or other mods, and I tested it without them, so I can’t tell you how it gets along with them.

Troubleshooting

• The first launch takes long: the mod compiles its shaders on the first start. That’s expected.
• The game doesn’t start on 26.3: check that your launcher runs Java 25 and that Fabric API is installed. My Fabric install guide shows how to read Fabric’s error screen.
• You died in survival: SS-03 and SS-05 can kill you if you stand in the strike zone. Aim further away.
• The land keeps changing after the film: according to the author, land far from the strike keeps being reshaped for a while after the film ends. Wait before you judge the result.
• No recipe in the recipe book: look through a spyglass once. That unlocks it.
• The remote doesn’t work on a server: the mod has to be installed on the server too, not just on your game.
• The flashing is too much: the author warns about full-screen flashing impact frames and strobing light. If you’re sensitive to that, skip the films with J or don’t use the mod.

How to install The Shooting Star

Install Fabric for Minecraft 26.3 with Fabric API, then download The Shooting Star [Demo] from the official CurseForge page and put both files into your mods folder. Make a copy of your world before you try it. Never installed a Fabric mod? Step by step: How to install Fabric mods in Minecraft 26.3.

Verdict

The Shooting Star is for players who want a show: creative worlds, test worlds, videos and screenshots.

• Pro: four cinematic strikes, each with its own film. The railgun alone is worth seeing.
• Pro: sliders for size, damage and speed, and J to skip the film.
• Con: every strike changes the world for good, so use a copy.
• Con: heavy shaders and lots of flashing, and it has to be on the server in multiplayer.
• Con: a demo, with four of the weapons and a watermark the author plans to remove later.