Introduction to AOE Clouds

Area-of-effect clouds, also known as AOE clouds and minecraft:area_effect_cloud internally, are special entities that have many unique properties. Normally these entities are created through throwing lingering potions, but with structures and some NBT editing magic we can manipulate them in very powerful ways for map-making.

Overview ​

Area-of-effect clouds have several special features we can take advantage of:

• As dummy entities, they are highly performant and barely affect framerate, and they are also completely static and have no collision with the world. This makes them perfect for situations around players or where precise positioning is important.
• It does not send the client updates. Once it spawns in, it will visually appear to be frozen in place until it despawns. However, it can still be moved around through commands just fine.
• It can apply any potion effect in highly configurable ways. The duration can be set down to the tick, as well as whether or not the effect is ambient, or displays on the screen, if it emits particles, etc.
• Entities with a runtime identifier of minecraft:area_effect_cloud inherit these same properties.

Method 1: Projectile Component ​

The projectile component supports spawning in area-of-effect clouds on hit. Minecraft uses this to spawn in AOE clouds from lingering potions.

Projectiles Documentation

Method 2: NBT Editing ​

Another way to spawn in these area-of-effect clouds is through structure files. This grants us finer control over the potion effects the cloud can have. So, our first order of business is getting a means to edit these structures.

NBT Editors ​

One of the following NBT editors are recommended:

• NBT Studio (a standalone program by tryashtar)
• NBT Viewer (a Visual Studio Code extension by Misode)

Structure file ​

For convenience, this article contains a premade structure file you can download and use. Inside is an AOE cloud that exists for the maximum possible time.

Refer to this article for editing structure files: .mcstructure

NBT Format ​

Below are the parameters for the mobEffects tag.