How to not do a sweep attack in Minecraft?

Question

I keep killing too many farm animals (and especially babys) due to sweep attack.
Is there a way to disable them?
I am open to plugins/mods as long as they work on 1.16.5.

Kodos Johnson · Accepted Answer

According to the wiki:

If the attack recharge meter is 84.8% or above, and the player is
standing or moving no faster than walking speed, the sword performs a
"sweeping" attack that can hit nearby enemies

So another way to prevent doing sweep attack is by doing a short sprint (by double tapping and holding the forward button) while attacking. I've been doing this to prevent hitting zombie villagers when I want to cure them but they are next to other hostile mobs.
I also just started noticing that doing a jump attack (jumping and then attacking on the way down) does not result in a sweep attack. This is probably because you fall from a jump faster than walking speed. This has the added bonus of doing increased damage to the target mob.

Kevin Reid · Answer

I don't know of a way to disable sweep attacks, but here are some ways to avoid performing sweep attacks:

Use an axe instead of a sword. Axes do not have sweep attacks. (However, they take double durability damage when being used as weapons.)

Switch to another item, then switch to the sword immediately before attacking. (This resets the charge/cooldown meter which has to be full for a sweep.)

Look up, attack the air (thus draining the meter), then look at the animal and attack it before the meter refills.

You could also take the different approach of attaching some sort of 'mob grinder' to your farm, so as to either:

Take the animals down to one-punch-kill health, so you can punch them instead of using a sword.

Instead of trying to avoid sweeps, make a gate that you can use to let only one or a few animals out to the separate killing area.

How to not do a sweep attack in Minecraft?

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