What Is Velocity (Anti-Knockback) in Minecraft?

Velocity is a combat module that reduces or cancels the knockback a player takes when an attack lands on them. The server tells the client how far to fly back after a hit. Velocity intercepts that instruction and shrinks it, so the player barely moves. It is also called anti-knockback.

How Velocity works

Velocity edits the pushback the server sends after a hit. When an entity is struck in Minecraft, the server sends the client a velocity update: a vector that says which way and how fast to move. The vanilla client applies that vector in full. Velocity catches the update first and scales it down before the player moves.

The scaling is usually a percentage on each axis. Horizontal pushback gets cut so the player does not slide backward, while vertical pushback often stays closer to normal so jumps and falls still look right. At zero percent the player takes no knockback at all. At a partial value they take some, which is harder to notice.

The same effect can be reached two ways. Some implementations modify the velocity packet as it arrives. Others let the vanilla movement run and then correct the position the next tick. Both end with the player holding ground they should have lost.

Common settings

Velocity modules expose a few values that trade safety against effect.

A full cancel is the strongest and the most obvious. Partial values, or a chance that skips some hits, look more like lag or a normal trade and draw less attention.

Why players use it

Velocity gives a melee advantage by keeping the player in range. Knockback normally breaks up a fight: each hit shoves both players apart, so they have to close the gap again. A player who takes less pushback stays on top of the target and keeps swinging while the other player drifts away. In a straight melee duel that is a large edge.

Why it gets detected

Velocity is detected because the server already knows how far the player should have moved. The server sends the knockback vector, so it can compare the position it expects against the position the client reports. When a player keeps absorbing hits without moving the predicted distance, the gap stands out.

Server-side anticheats track this directly. They watch how much of each knockback the player actually applied across many hits. A player who consistently keeps more ground than physics allows is flagged. A full cancel is trivial to catch. Partial reduction is harder, which is why many implementations never go to zero.

Velocity vs other combat modules

Velocity is unusual among combat modules because it changes what happens to the player rather than what the player does to a target. KillAura and an aimbot act on the enemy, automating aiming and attacks. Velocity acts on the player's own position, overriding a server instruction about how far they should move after a hit. The shared trait is that both override something the server expects to control.

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