Genius Loci

A magic system built on journeys, and what you bring home from them.

Essence is in everything. It is in the heat of a desert and the weight of a mountain, the wet of an ocean and the quiet of a deep cave. It has always been there, you could simply never see it. There is no ore to mine for it and no mob that drops it. There is only the world, and how far you are willing to go into it.

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Your first hour

Craft the essence spectacles. Two panes of glass and a set of iron bars. They cost no essence, because you have none yet — that is the point.

Look around. Ten small marks appear above your hotbar, showing what the ground beneath you holds, most to least. A desert runs hot and dry. A ravine runs hollow. An ancient city runs cursed and dark. Every place has been saying what it is; now you can hear it.

Plant a ley cage. Set one down in a place worth having and it binds to that place forever. What it sends is a current, a live trickle, arriving every minute, for as long as it stands.

Carry the far end home. Touch a second cage to the first to link them, and hold onto it. When you return home, set it down. The link holds across any distance and any dimension. No route to build, no chunks to keep loaded, nothing to maintain.

Build something to spend it on. Affinity membranes are thin glass plates you lay into whatever you have built. Put an item on one, name what you want with ordinary items on the others, and pulse it with redstone. Foci are little glass blocks you can link to cages to create points where particles stream from. If you link your membrane to the focus, then you'll immediately link the membrane to all the cages the focus was linked to, and have the particles stream from the focus instead. This gives you more control over your altar design.

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What it is for

Four things, all of which Minecraft already does:

• Inscribing: Alternative for enchantment; you don't need to grind lecterns or play the enchanting table or fishing slot machines.
• Disenchanting: Comes in two flavors; you can either wipe all enchantments (including curses) off an item, or you can remove enchantments/curses one level at a time.
• Brewing: Potions without the need to visit the Nether right away.
• Repairing: A worn tool restored; no more "too expensive" messages or XP wastage.
• Smelting: Smelting and cooking without fuel; with enough essence, this can be faster than the furnace. Unfortunately, it's one-at-a-time without hoppers.

Each ships as a datapack you can switch off. A pack that wants to keep vanilla enchanting can have it.

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What it is not

This is an infrastructure mod. It does not include new content. It is explicitly designed to support players, other modders, or modpack authors in their own designs, not enforce it's own. It does not remove existing content; even if vanilla effects have an alternate path, the classic blocks can still be used if the player desires.

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How the magic reads

Twelve concepts, twenty-four essences. Hot and Cold. Wet and Dry. Bound and Severed. Each is one half of an opposed pair, and a place carries some mixture of them.

Meaning is composed, never looked up. You do not learn a recipe list. You learn what things mean (a magma block is heat, string binds, TNT is aggressive) and you assemble a full meaning from them (bound + healing = mending). Opposites cancel because they are opposites, not because a rule says so. Eighty enchantments and status effects are reachable this way, and none of them were designed as a recipe.

It is a current, not a stockpile. Nothing is stored. A cage delivers so many motes a minute, and a job takes as long as its scarcest essence needs. Running short slows you down; it never fails.

You can see all of it. Wearing the spectacles, essence flows as colored particles: a spray means this is supplied, a marching line means this is needed. Look at an altar and it tells you what it would make before you commit.

It has progression. When dealing with enchantment or brewing, the minimum amount of essence will provide the first level. To increase the level of enchantment or potion you can produce, you need to collect more of at least one of its ingredient essences to increase the pressure of the flow. Level 2 enchantments and amplified potions require at least 2 motes of essence, level 3 enchantments require at least 3, and so on.

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Why you'd leave home

Most magic mods end with a room you never leave. This one is built the other way: every essence you want is somewhere else, and the only way to get it is to go. A light mage, a fire mage and a life mage end up with visibly different altars, because they walked to different places. Nothing punishes staying home. But part of the fun of Minecraft is exploring, and if you have one more reason to explore (to find more essence), why not?!

This is especially the case if you have worldgen mods like Terralith and Tectonic; These just expand the kinds of exploration you can do. It also pairs well with mods that reward building; it deliberately does not compete for that ground. In fact, if you fill your pack with worldgen and decorative mods, there's no limit to how you can design your altar!

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For pack authors and modders

Almost everything is data. Concepts, anchors, effects, place values and whole new workings are datapack registries. A pack can add an essence, teach the mod what a modded item means, say what a modded biome is worth, or write a freezing mechanic, all with no Java at all. Even the in-game guide has datapack support for those who wish to add to it.

Nothing is enumerated. Adding a concept costs no changes anywhere else. Third-party content is displayed, diagnosed and drawn by the base mod's own code, so an addon never has to reimplement the readouts.

No hard dependencies. Curios, Jade and claim mods are used where present and never required. Recipe browser support ships as separate JEI and EMI addons.

An API is available. The mod includes an API for the purpose of integrating other mods into it. If you want to add extra enchantments or potions, or you want to implement your own trinket system, and you want them to draw on essence, this mod should be able to support you.

Essence recipe conflicts are gracefully resolved. When you add effects and want to add recipes for these effects, you can choose an essence order (most to least essence) or an exact recipe. In the case you chose an order, or if two mods' recipes conflict, this mod will find a recipe matching your recipe order (either explicit, or measured from your original recipe) to remove the conflict.

The Field Guide expands itself. If you add additional essences, effects, places, or guide book sections through datapacks, the Field Guide will expand itself to include these, reflecting all compatible mods' additions as part of the default guide.

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For server maintainers

No chunkloading is required. This mod does not use simulation to handle the transport of magic; there is no ticking involved. The ley network carrying essence is simply a lookup stored in the worldfile that updates when a block is added or removed.

Secure, but doesn't conflict with claim mods. This mod will protect source blocks by ownership, but will still work under whatever claim or permission mods the server maintainer chooses to use.

Configurable. This mod is meant to be as un-opinionated as possible. There are a number of options, both in datapacks and in server options, that you can set to fine tune how you want the mod to operate.

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Accessibility

• Every essence has its own symbol. Color is reinforcement, never the only channel.

• Vision profiles for the common forms of color vision deficiency, each one spacing every concept as far apart as that viewer can actually distinguish; measured, not assumed.

• Every particle can be turned off, and the motion can be stopped separately from the particles. Nothing is lost by it: the same facts are reported in words and numbers.

• Sounds carry captions; the game's own settings are respected rather than duplicated.

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Status

Beta. Minecraft 1.21.1, NeoForge. The mechanics are complete and playable; place values are written and still being tuned by actually walking around in them.