Contract Blade 1.2.0 — Update Notes

From 1.1.1 to 1.2.0.

This was supposed to be a small update. Somehow, it grew into a new challenge, new spirit abilities, and a danmaku kit for ordinary contract maids.

Your blade is getting a little crowded.

Black Fox Challenge: The Sealed Rift

• Added the shrine dream ritual and Black Fox challenge. Bring your original shrine White Fox blade, place a blade stand holding a Black Fox blade at the designated spot in the small rear shrine, and sleep in a nearby bed at night to enter.
• The entire challenge and Black Fox liberation route are available without BladeTetra.
• Added a dedicated arena, Boss health bar, dimensional rifts, afterimages, blade effects, and attack sounds. Attacks have readable cues, while clashes and successful parries receive clearer audio, sparks, and camera feedback.
• Black Fox uses phantom sword formations, complete Combo B chains, and repeated dimensional assaults, with tighter transitions between attacks.
• Successfully parrying qualifying skills builds toward breaking her stance. Five successful skill parries create a brief counterattack opportunity—deflecting a few ordinary attacks will not keep her permanently stunned.
• Added a four-corner blade-seal formation. The seals strengthen her defenses until you destroy them individually.
• Depleting her health triggers the final core encounter. Destroy the core to complete the challenge.
• Defeat safely returns you instead of killing you. Victory starts an arena-collapse countdown, followed by an automatic return.
• Adjusted challenge damage and removed Black Fox’s additional ordinary-hit protection interval. Skill-specific defenses and vanilla hurt rules remain.
• Added configurable Boss health and damage multipliers for modpack balancing.

You can win. You just cannot expect her to politely wait while you do it.

Black Fox: “My turn.”

Black Fox: Final Art — Boundary-Sealing Sword Core

• Completing the challenge grants the original Black Fox blade its rescued spirit and exclusive Sword Art, while preserving the blade’s existing forging progress.
• Activating the SA deploys an overhead core that attacks nearby enemies using SlashBlade’s native phantom swords and phantom blades.
• Progression unlocks complete Combo B pursuit, sword marks, death-triggered chains, owner-following movement, lock-on priority, retaliation, and dual-mode coordination.
• Once mode switching is unlocked, activating the SA again toggles between the projectile formation and Combo B pursuit. You do not need to wait for the current core to disappear.
• The core lasts approximately 20 seconds by default. Switching modes does not refresh its duration. No additional SA cooldown is imposed; native Proud Soul costs and applicable Resonance costs still apply.
• Attacks avoid players, maids, your tamed animals, and other friendly targets.

Not just pretty purple fireworks. These ones actually cut.

White Fox: Protection and Oath

• Added a complete ten-level defensive progression, gradually unlocking protection, cleansing, healing, post-guard mobility and absorption, coordinated slashes, maid healing, emergency protection, and the Fox’s Oath.
• Cleansing removes specified harmful effects rather than indiscriminately erasing every mechanic added by other mods.
• Healing builds through valid combat hits instead of providing permanent passive regeneration. At higher levels, it can also support a nearby injured maid belonging to you.
• Higher levels support Black Fox in the main hand and White Fox in the off hand.
• The Fox’s Oath can prevent a fatal hit when its conditions are met, leaving you with a small amount of health before entering its own long cooldown.
• Basic protection is free. Even without Resonance, the Oath retains its basic life-saving effect; additional cleansing, shields, and other enhancements require their respective resources.
• The original White Fox blade gains its special Purifying Edge effect during the Black Fox challenge, providing temporary attack supplementation and additional purification damage.

She cannot take every hit for you. She can, however, try to leave you enough health to say, “I’m fine.”

Akatsuki: Garden of No Return and Soul Binding

• Added a ten-level domain progression, Garden of No Return, for BladeTetra’s awakened Akatsuki.
• With the spirit residing in the blade and the required conditions met, holding Akatsuki automatically activates the domain. Progression unlocks spatial cuts, area attacks, target acquisition, retaliation, kill chains, emergency rescue, and sword rain.
• Low health activates the rampage presentation. Visuals gradually settle after combat instead of permanently covering the screen.
• Added aerial Soul Core interactions. Precisely strike a core above its target to trigger a short, multi-stage soul barrage, accompanied by Star-Orbit sword-chain effects.
• Soul Cores created from ordinary valid hits provide additional critical damage. Against supported special damage caps, progression allows you to recover part of the damage suppressed from that attack.
• Improved compatibility with certain unusual health systems and damage-capped Bosses, including the Steel Guardian. This does not mean every shield or protected transition phase can be bypassed unconditionally.
• Higher-level emergency rescue has its own cooldown, which cannot be reset by swapping blades or reconnecting.
• Akatsuki’s appearance model is not included in this release. Awakening, domain, and Soul Core gameplay remain available, and the maid’s existing skin will not be forcibly replaced.

The blade is allowed to be dramatic. The damage calculations still have to behave.

Ordinary Contracts Get Spell Cards Too: Manka Talisman

• Added the Manka Talisman maid bauble, granting danmaku abilities to ordinary contract weapons.
• It works while an ordinary contract maid wears the talisman and resides inside your currently held main-hand contract weapon. Manifesting the maid, switching away, or removing the talisman disables its abilities.
• Ordinary attacks automatically release homing spirit bullets, with an enhanced coordinated volley when repeatedly attacking the same target.
• All four forms are immediately available, without Contract Mastery level requirements: Needle, Blossom, Guard, and Fantasy Manka.
• Needle concentrates homing fire, Blossom pressures multiple targets, Guard intercepts hostile projectiles and retaliates, and Fantasy Manka releases multiple danmaku waves.
• Added a spell-selection wheel, spell-card announcements, and accompanying effects. By default, tap the middle mouse button to cast the selected form, or hold it to open the wheel and release to select. The key binding is configurable.
• The talisman is a separate enhancement path for ordinary contracts. It does not grant extra spell cards to dedicated spirit routes such as Black Fox, White Fox, or Akatsuki, nor does it include the Sword Tassel’s equipment projection.

Ordinary maid: “Everyone else gets a special move. Surely a little danmaku is fair?”

Contract Growth, Resonance, and Spirit Veins

• Contract growth now belongs to the player. Your contracts share progression, so changing blades does not mean starting over. Each maid still retains her own favorability.
• Every maid has an independent Resonance pool, with a default maximum of 1,000. Existing Resonance is imported proportionally rather than reset.
• Introduced a clearer cycle: manifest the maid to recover Resonance, then return her to the blade to use spirit abilities. Manifestation suspends the corresponding dedicated spirit enhancements while accelerating that maid’s recovery.
• Default natural recovery rates are:
  • Stored and out of combat: 2.5 per second.
  • Stored and in combat: no natural recovery.
  • Manifested and out of combat: 20 per second.
  • Manifested and in combat: 10 per second.
• Manual manifestation, ordinary injuries, remaining manifested, manual recall, and emergency protective recall do not consume Resonance. Zero Resonance does not prevent manual summoning or automatically force the maid back into the blade.
• Kills, coordination with a manifested maid, eating, and healing can still help restore Resonance. Taking damage itself no longer grants Resonance by default.
• Added Awakening, Flowing, and Endless Spirit Veins. Using them in order permanently increases natural Resonance recovery across your contracts to ×1.25, ×1.60, and ×2.00.
• Spirit Veins do not increase maximum Resonance or instantly refill it. Spirit Crystals provide direct recovery, now have a complete maid-altar recipe, and are not wasted when Resonance is already full.
• Added the endgame Endless Contract bauble. It retains weapon and armor projection while waiving the equipped maid’s Resonance costs, including while she resides in her weapon.
• Endless Contract does not waive Proud Soul costs, skill cooldowns, or unlock requirements, and does not automatically grant Manka Talisman abilities.

The contract is endless. The server’s willingness to work overtime is not.

Companions, Models, and Item Descriptions

• Added a configurable limit for simultaneously following contract maids. The default remains one; setting it to two enables dual summons. Home-mode and waiting maids do not occupy following slots.
• Multiple maids now handle recall, recovery, and coordination rewards independently, reducing interference between contracts.
• Resonance Sword Tassel, Heartbound Knot, and Endless Contract no longer automatically change combat tasks, feeding tasks, or schedules. Equipment projection remains; you choose the maid’s work.
• Improved Black and White Fox’s three-tail movement during walking, running, turning, and stopping, with softer tip follow-through. Native daily-life, combat, flight, and fox-form animation compatibility is retained.
• The Black and White Fox maid models do not require YSM. A separate YSM model pack is also available and must be installed separately; it is not bundled inside the mod JAR.
• Redrew the Spirit Vein item progression with consistent colors, clearer growth silhouettes, and subtle animation. Added matching pixel artwork for the Manka Talisman.
• Standardized item tooltips: short flavor text by default, with practical instructions, conditions, and limitations shown while holding Shift.
• Reorganized Black Fox, White Fox, and Akatsuki descriptions to show current ability values, upcoming progression, and relevant status without repeating lengthy introductions.
• Updated the handbook, recipe explanations, and Chinese and English text.
• Reduced package size by removing background music and unnecessary duplicate resources. Combat sounds and normal character presentation remain.

Fixes and Compatibility

• Fixed interrupted eating and missing food-record or wish progress when used with Spice of Life: Maid’s Dream, including without equipment projection and in Home mode.
• Fixed incorrect food and held-equipment restoration when removing projection baubles or recalling a maid during eating.
• Fixed original equipment potentially being lost when a player manually replaced it with an identical item during projection.
• Fixed TACZ projection overwriting manually equipped real items, and projected weapons potentially remaining after projection ended.
• Fixed spell loadouts not refreshing promptly when projected equipment contents changed.
• Fixed crashes when entering the Black Fox arena or activating her exclusive SA.
• Fixed contract transitions after Black Fox victory that could prevent existing fox spirits from manifesting or transferring, or leave the reward SA unusable.
• Strengthened data protection during storage, manifestation, transfer, dimension changes, and recovery, while improving storage efficiency and multi-contract processing.

Before You Update

• Back up the entire world and keep your existing configuration files. Replace the old JAR rather than installing both. Clients and servers should use the same version.
• Growth and Resonance progress are saved with the world. Moving only a weapon to another server does not bring all of the original world’s progression with it.
• If an existing Akatsuki does not activate the new domain, try manifesting and recalling her normally once.
• These fixes prevent the related item-loss issues from recurring, but cannot automatically restore real items already lost.
• Optional integrations such as SlashBlade, BladeTetra, and YSM still require their respective mods to be installed separately.

That is all for this update. Take her out for a walk—and remember to let her out of the blade for some fresh air occasionally.