The suite's most delicate module, because it touches the game's very physics.
The vision
A Minecraft entity is a box: you hit it, or you do not. Combat replaces that with procedural hitboxes localized per body part, with strike and impact animations generated rather than replayed identically.
The gesture then depends on the weapon's stats and on whether a shield is carried, and the target's reaction varies with the zone hit and the damage taken, from a simple stagger to stumbling and falling.
The module honestly splits into two unequal halves. The safe part is the player-side gesture, weight balance, procedural animation, targeted damage: it operates on an entity fully under control.
The uncertain part is the enemy's feedback, because it means reading and driving the skeleton of an arbitrary target, potentially added by a mod. That is where the module can break, and so that is where it moves carefully.
Hence a staged delivery: first generic reactions that depend on no skeleton, knockback, flash, sound, which work on any monster; only then per-zone stumbling and falling, on skeletons that can be read.
The weight and balance of a weapon forged in Smith determine a stance, which changes the reachable zones and the recovery speed. Choosing or forging a weapon means choosing a way to fight, and that stays entirely on the module's safe side.
Chaining heavy blows winds you and imposes a rhythm, parry, dodge, strike, rather than mashing. Depth comes from the gesture, without touching damage numbers.
Large combat mods already exist, and fighting them would serve no one. Combat can detect them and bow out cleanly when they are present, or stand as the only option in their absence: the same automatic-with-fallback principle as the rest of the suite.