The Void Shield is a very cool concept, creating a magic barrier to protect yourself or anyone you care to cast it on. But it's held back by many, many limitations, and through rigorous testing I've found that its only effective use case is vs mundane bows (i.e fighting skeletons) and when given to automatic crossbows.

Problem 1: You can easily kill a Void Shield casted on yourself. https://streamable.com/ml8wzd
This immediately defeats the purpose of using the shield, as it becomes the only thing you can hit with your weapon (the shield passively pushes mobs away on contact, so you can't even clip them through it to hit them).

Problem 2: When casted on Autocasters, it blocks Bolt-medium spells fired by the Autocaster, but Projectile-medium spells can be fired through it. https://streamable.com/pjijtr
I guess that's a point in favor of Projectiles, but not being able to use a Bolt alongside a Void Shield leaves a sour taste in my mouth. (For the record, the void shield blocks projectile spells from the front just fine. I wonder if this is because the projectile spawns in front of the caster?)

Problem 3: Void Shields are counterproductive to melee mob combat. (No footage of this, but imagine a carrot on a stick attached to the golem's head. It's like that.)

I don't know how much of this is already known among the devs, and if it is, I'm sorry for wasting your time.

For problem 1, are you using a Swing Through Grass implementation? I discovered punching grass while possessing an undead creature in Dissolution caused me to basically punch myself while Swing Through Grass was enabled in PiTweaks.

No I was not.

1. I added something in that should have made that not happen, but it looks like it either broke completely or something in your setup is breaking it. I'll test it again later to make sure I didn't break it, but if I didn't I will need your mod list to diagnose further.
2. I had to do some intensive changes to the bolts to make them work with void shields, so I might have messed up a non-player check somewhere. Projectiles don't need that intensive workaround so they work fine.
3. I will give you that one, singular shields are not amazing for melee mobs at the moment. That's why I gave the Eldritch Warden multiple / rotating shields to mitigate that a bit (if you don't see that, turn up the difficulty). Any ideas on how to make them better for the general case would be appreciated.

Here's the modlist my pack's using at the moment, it's all just "hey I wanna use this." https://pastebin.com/TiXs9qcP

honestly i'm afraid of what might be causing it

Any ideas on how to make them better for the general case would be appreciated.

Well see that suddenly made me imagine multiple "modes" for the shield, one being the classic unidirectional version, one being rotary shields, and one being effectively discount runic shield, essentially wrapping the target in a layer of protective magic. The latter one sounds weird, but the ability to give golems runic shielding is so enticing...

I cannot replicate 1. directly in just TA and its dependents, but you can still attack the shield if you perform the sweeping attack of any sword.

So the mod that lets me hit my own Void Shield appears to be potion core. Shame, I loved its armor display.

So the mod that lets me hit my own Void Shield appears to be potion core. Shame, I loved its armor display.

I can probably try to add compat in this case, because it seems the reason it doesn't work is because it replaces a vanilla thing that my code is expecting to be there. Generally, completely replacing classes like that mod does is not a good idea.

but you can still attack the shield if you perform the sweeping attack of any sword

I'll look into stopping the sweep attack from hitting your own shield - to be honest I'll probably just make the void shield immune to your own melee attacks in all cases, as other than sweep attacks the only time that would come into play is if the shield is being broken by some other mod like in this case with Potion Core. The game seems to already make entities on the same team not hurt each other with sweep attacks, but a normal entity shouldn't be messing with teams.

And just for good measure, it's immune to the elemental arcing Infusion Enchantment, right? (Sword of the Zephyr)

And just for good measure, it's immune to the elemental arcing Infusion Enchantment, right? (Sword of the Zephyr)

Not like I forgot that existed or anything I mean yes, that was definitely included the entire time.

I also thought of a solution to make the shield better on melee mobs - if the owner of the shield takes melee damage from the direction the shield is in, make the shield take damage instead. That would make sense, as if minecraft mobs actually did a raycast or something like that instead of just a boundary box check they would hit the shield and not the owner.

Hey, tried the new update. Seems the void shield blocks your impetus cannon. Standard impetus cannon is even able to kill it