New weapon! The Tome of Hexes

The tome of hexes is an incredibly powerful support tool. In order to use it you must hold down and use it for 10 seconds, after this time has passed you will get a random level 1 hex buff at random, allowing you to pass that hex onto others for a short time. However, imbuing it with cosmic energy with a kosmic gem will allow you to specialise the hex, making it guarantee the one it gives you, and giving you the level 2 variation of it.

Be careful however, these things come at a cost. While using the tome you are incredibly vulnerable, having your movement speed reduced by 90% while it makes sounds that can be heard from a decent bit away. If you stop using the tome at any point, the negative hex will be placed on you for 10 seconds, and you won’t be able to attempt using the tome for 10 seconds.

The tome can be interrupted, if you get hit by an entity, you will be unable to concentrate, and you’ll stop reading the tome.

But, if you are able to utilise the tome, you will be imbued with the ability to use the hex to your advantage.

The tome has an incredibly unique item to craft it… I wonder how you get it?

More on Hexes:

Hexes are effects that you can get from the Tome of Hexes. They come in the buff and debuff varieties and are incredibly powerful. Each of them can be incredibly complex so this section is dedicated to them.

Any entity with the positive version of the hex will apply the negative version to any entities that it deals damage to in any way. This includes the entity with the positive effect, so be careful about self damage while using a hex. This will clear any hexes that the victim has and apply the new one.

Entities can only have 1 positive and 1 negative version of the hex effects.

A note is that in Astral Arsenal you are only intended to be able to get the level 1 and 2 variants of these effects, however using commands and other mods can change this. They do have functionality for those cases, but this could lead to some unintended side effects.

Each of these also comes with a kosmogliph for the Tome of Hexes. That text will be given here as well.

It should be noted that hexes are applied after the attack, so any that increase the damage dealt to the attacked player have no effect unless they are already applied.

Hex of breaching - “Halves the effectiveness of opponents defensive kosmogliphs”

• Reduces the damage reduction from your defensive kosmogliph by 25% per level and has additional effects for most of these kosmogliphs. This does not make it so that you take more than 100% of the damage.
  • Antidote: reduces the reduction of negative effects by 25% per level and the time increase of positive ones by 25%. (due to implementation this does not scale linearly)
  • Thermal: Frost and Fire are no longer removed from you
  • Reflective: Reduces the chance to reverse projectiles headed towards you by 25% per level
  • Conductive: Reduces the charge gained from damage by 25% per level

Hex of Diminishing - “Slowly causes your opponent to lose maximum life if they are below max hp”

• The effect slowly reduces the max hp of the afflicted at about a heart per 5 seconds at lvl 1 and 2 hearts at lvl 2.
• The effect does not reduce the max hp of the afflicted if they are not at max hp (or less than 1 hp away from max hp)

Hex of Weakening - “Decreases the damage your opponent can inflict”

• Decreases all damage your opponent inflicts by 10% at lvl 1 and 20% at lvl 2.

Hex of Blazing - “Doubles the damage your opponent takes from frost and fire damage over time.”

• Fire and frost deal 1.5x damage over time at lvl 1 and 2x at lvl 2.

Hex of Cleansing - “Triples the rate your opponent uses positive effects.”

• Positive effects on the afflicted will tick down 2x as fast at lvl 1 and 3x as fast at lvl 2.

Hex of Impeding - “Slows your opponent by 25%”

• The afflicted moves 12.5% slower on ground and in the air at lvl 1 and 25% slower at lvl 2.

Hex of Magnetising - “Your opponent attracts projectiles towards them”

• has a slight magnetic effect that gets stronger as it levels up
• Magnetism is negated when the inflicted has the “immortal” buff.
• Does not affect arrows that are 4 seconds old or older

Changes to weapons:

Railgun ▲

• Now has base functionality akin to basic railgun. This version however does 25% as much damage and has a longer cooldown, with no damage penalty. This is so it has yknow, something.
• the base effect can not trigger the “railed” death message. Updated the Basic railgun description to reflect this.
• changed the descriptions of all the railgun kosmogliphs to reflect this.

Balance changes:

All pillars of light ▲

• Increased how low and high the beams deal damage, 50 -> 500
• Deals 3x damage to non-players

LockOff ▼

• Increased cooldown 5s -> 30s

Ricochet ▲

• Now homes onto nearby targets, making it so it can more easily hit a target twice. It will however only aim to hit twice, and the third hit is not guaranteed.

Slam ▲

• You can now dash, dodge, and jump out of a slam for more precise movement

Wind eruption ▲

• Reduced cooldown 5s -> 2s

Pulveriser ▲

• Reduced cooldown 10s -> 5s
• Increased time held to get to the second tier from 2.5 seconds to 3 seconds, this is to make the gap between tier 2 and tier 3 and tier 1 and tier 2 the same length.

Cannonballs ▲

• Cannonballs can now be “charged” through a couple means, 1. Being near a charged cannonball or a player ready to discharge their capacitance, 2. Any beam of light besides lock-off
• Charged cannonballs will lock on to nearby entities, if it locks on for 1 second, it will zap them dealing 2 damage. This ignores damage cooldowns on non-players.
• When a charged cannonball hits an entity, any entity it is connected to will be instantly zapped as well
• When a charged cannonball hits a block and explodes, it does an AOE discharge like capacitance, this discharge will spread the same damage as it has accumulated, so the more entities it has hit, the higher the discharge’s damage will be.
• When a charged cannonball is hit to be redirected, it deals 2 damage to the entity that hit it.

Shotgun ▼

• Arrows are no longer considered “Critical”

Bleed ▼

• Ranged hits now inflict bleed 3 instead of 5
• Reduced the time bleed is inflicted 20s -> 10s
• Is now capped at lvl 10(4dps)

Reduce ▼

• Plasma damage and magic damage are now unaffected by reduce.

Reflective ▼

• Now only reflects specific projectiles, those being arrows, spectral arrows, tridents, nails, and cannonballs. This is a tag.

Capacitance ↺

• Reduced max player damage 15 -> 10
• Increased damage accumulated 75% -> 100%

Endurance ↺

• Reduced base damage reduction to 30%
• Now has three “Defence charges” having a charge increases damage reduction to 70%
• When you are hit by a melee source you loose 1 defence charge and the recharge time on your next one is reset.
• It takes 5 seconds to recharge a defence charge.

Dash/dodge ▼

• Reduced immunity ticks 5 -> 3

Changed most railgun types to make them more effective on non-players:

• Ray of Frost deals 3x damage to non-players and spawns ice shards on non-players hit.
• Ricochet deals 2x damage to non-players.
• Rancid brew deals 2x damage to non-players, and the effects last 5x as long on non-players

Aesthetical changes

• Beams of light can now be coloured. This is to better indicate them to players.
• Devastate is now blue, as it always should have been
• Time bomb is now red
• Lock-off is now red and gold and has less inner cubes to aid performance
• Enraged beams no longer display differently.
• Slightly adjusted the colours of some railguns
• Electricity is now generally light blue and white.
• Parry now renders a beam like the explosive railgun, just smaller.
• New icons
• Heavy, Reflective, Endurance, Thermal, Capacitance, and antidote have new icons.
• New sound effects
  • The railgun has a fully new sound effect rather than stealing from ultrakill
• All railguns - besides ricochet, also render for a little bit longer to match with the new sounds
• Conductive when it can be triggered on hit will now have a visual effect of small electric shocks into the nearby air. When conductive can be triggered it will also cause electric beams to attach to any entity in range of the nearby entity spark.
• Adjusted a lot of the electrical stuff including conductive and capacitance.
• Nails will now only last 15 seconds while stationary instead of 60, this is to save performance
• Snipe has been renamed to “Dual Caliber”
• Basic railgun has been renamed to “Unstable Discharge”

Changes to recipes (making things less painful)

• Removed ALL Amerald recipes. I would recommend using all of your amerald up before you download this update as they will become useless. This includes emerald dust.
• Reduced the cost of the cosmic table by replacing the diamond blocks with diamonds
• Reduced the cost of the railgun by replacing the diamonds with more iron bars
• Reduced the cost of amethyst dust, 9 shards -> 3 shards
• Changed the ratio of lapis-quartz for Lazulica to be 4:4 instead of 2:6

Changes to vanilla:

Harming arrows ↺

• Now deal a flat 2 damage per level, instead of dealing damage to make up to 12. This way, tapping a harming arrow doesn’t deal 11 damage, and harming arrows have utility with power and high damage arrows.
• Harming arrows deal 0 bonus damage if the arrow damage is less than 3, this has no effect on arrows with medium charge on the bow, but tapped arrows will deal less damage as a result.

Power ▼

• Power grants less damage % per level, 25% -> 12.5%
• This gives a maximum damage bonus of 75% rather then 150%
• To compensate, non-player entities take x1.5 damage to arrows. This slightly buffs arrows against mobs. This does also buff the crossbow against mobs, so you’re welcome crossbow enjoyers. Now you can deal 12 damage instead of 8

Bugfixes

• The beam renderer should function better, allowing you to see beams even if the origin is further away.
• To compensate for this however, the inner cubes of pillars of light has been halved. This should make them a bit more performant and allow you to see through them a bit better.
• Railguns no longer get stopped by blades of grass and any other block that players can pass through
• Fixed a rare issue that caused cannonballs without an owner to cause a null pointer exception when exploding. They now will not explode if they have no owner.
• Fixed railgun beams causing multiple explosions when hitting a cannonball, causing incredibly high knockback.
• Fixed lock off having an incorrect description
• Fixed the damage source of an explosive beam cannonball being attributed to the cannonball and not the player
• Fixed Wind Eruption’s explosion being out of sync with the sound effects.
• Capacitance will now have a fixed radius instead of a cube
• Chain lightning effects will now target the center of an entity instead of hovering one block above its lowest point.
• Reflective now changes the ownership of the projectile.
• Reflective can now reflect the same projectile multiple times, but only if it has been redirected to you again. If it failed to be reflected at any point however, it will never be reflected by your chestplate.
• Reflective will no longer try and reflect projectiles lodged in the ground or walls
• Fixed a bug where bleed and reduce would apply level 1 of their effect instead of the correct level
• Corrected bleeds description from saying 0.75 per level to 0.4 per level
• Added information to both bleed and reduce stating their stacking effect.
• Fixed rancid brew having an incorrect description
• Corrected basic railguns description incorrectly stating it dealt 2x damage to non-players instead of 4x.
• Fixed occasions where the client would think the player had an effect when they didn’t, causing visual bugs with effects, this most notably affected slam jump and conductive on rare occasions.
• Immortal no longer give immunity to self damage such as the railguns “drain”

Final notes

This one took quite the while, huh? Almost 3 months between 3.1 and 4.0, I hope this one is well worth the wait. I want to give many many many thanks to my new beta testers for helping me test the final parts of this update recently and look forward to their help in the future. They helped me catch a few issues with the new weapon.

I also want to give you all some final bits of information. Of course, you can go over to the Team Voided discord server to chat with me about this update and Astral arsenal as a whole, You can go over to the GitHub Issues page for this mod to report bugs, request enhancements, etc. You knew about these. But I want to add that you can now support this mod and any other projects that I end up doing on my Ko-Fi page, you do not have to but with the end of exams coming up and me likely having to get a job soon after then, the more donations I can get the closer I can be to making some of a living off of this stuff. I do have plans to do more with the benefits for people who choose to support me long term with a membership.

I also want to make you all aware that there are plans to give Astral Arsenal a page on the modded wiki and I will update the description of both the curseforge and modrinth pages once that is done and dusted.

I hope you all enjoy this update, it was so much fun to make.