/give succeeds when trying to give more than 100 stacks of an item despite the failure message and no items being given

The /give command has a built-in limit on items given (100 stacks) to prevent players from creating too many items and lagging or crashing the server. However, even though the command gives no items and produces a failure message when trying to overcome the aforementioned limit, the command actually technically succeeds, which can break data packs expecting the command’s success value to be 0.

How to reproduce:

1. Execute the following command:

   /execute store success storage mc-302537:test success_value int 1 run give @s minecraft:stick 6401

2. Execute the following command:

   /data get storage mc-302537:test success_value

   → ❌ The value stored is 1, indicating the command executed by the run argument of the first command succeeded.

Expected result:

The /give command would fail when trying to give more than 100 stacks of an item.

Observed result:

The /give command succeeds when trying to give more than 100 stacks of an item despite no items being given and a failure message being sent.

Code analysis:

This code analysis uses 1.21.9’s code, decompiled and deobfuscated using McDeob.

In the net.minecraft.server.commands.GiveCommand class, there is a method called giveItem, which is called when the command is run. The start of this method is shown below:

private static int giveItem(CommandSourceStack commandsourcestack, ItemInput iteminput, Collection<ServerPlayer> collection, int i) throws CommandSyntaxException {
    ItemStack itemstack = iteminput.createItemStack(1, false);
    int j = itemstack.getMaxStackSize();
    int k = j * 100;
    if (i > k) {
        commandsourcestack.sendFailure(Component.translatable("commands.give.failed.toomanyitems", k, itemstack.getDisplayName()));
        return 0;
    } else {
        ...

When the count argument of the command is set to a number greater than 100 times the maximum stack size of the item to be given, the command sends a failure message and returns a Brigadier return value. When a command returns a value, it is considered successful, and its success value is therefore set to 1. Most other commands, when failing, throw a CommandSyntaxException instead of returning a value, since the game only sets a command’s success value to 0 when such an exception is thrown.