Wisp & Willow 1.4.0 — The Foundations Update

Minecraft 1.21.1 · NeoForge 21.1.213

The biggest update yet. Your altar is no longer a single block that does everything — it now sits on a foundation of runes that decides what rites it can perform and how well. Alongside that: pool crafting, three working flowers, bound familiars, and a completely rewritten in-game guide.

Existing worlds are safe. Altars you already built keep working at Tier I. Lay runes underneath when you want more.

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✨ Altar Tiers & Rune Foundations

Rites are now gated behind altar tier, and tier comes from the runes you lay one block below the altar in complete concentric rings.

Tier	Rings	Runes needed
I	—	0
II	1	8
III	2	24
IV	3	48
V	4	80

Rings must be complete — a gap drops you back a tier. Runes sit at ground level and never interfere with the ritual circle drawn on the altar's own layer.

Four rune types, and the mix decides your bonuses:

• Blank Rune — structure only, no bonus
• Water Rune — +2,000 Fluxia reserve each
• Earth Rune — +0.5% cost reduction each
• Blood Rune — +0.4% bonus-output chance each

Cost reduction and yield each cap at 50%, and 75% once familiar boons are stacked on top, so a maxed foundation is strong but never free.

⚗️ Fluxia Infusion — Crafting in the Pool

Throw items into a charged Willow Fluxia Pool and they transmute. 9 infusion recipes ship in 1.4.0, covering all four runes, all three blooms, and both upgraded tablets.

The pool wants the exact ingredients and nothing else — stray items floating in it stop the reaction rather than being silently eaten. Short of charge, it puffs smoke and waits instead of failing quietly.

🌸 Functional Flora

Luxinia and Solrosa make Fluxia. These three spend it. Link them to a pool with the Flux Linking Wand like any other machine — each only draws charge on a tick where it actually did something, so a bloom sitting over barren ground costs you nothing.

• Verdant Bloom — bonemeals one growable within 5 blocks every 2s, for 60 ƒ
• Gathering Bloom — sweeps loose items within 6 blocks into the inventory directly beneath it, twice a second, for 10 ƒ
• Warding Bloom — banishes freshly-spawned hostiles within 12 blocks, once a second, for 40 ƒ

The Warding Bloom only takes monsters at full health that spawned naturally — nothing you led home, and nothing mid-fight, is ever deleted out from under you.

🐾 Familiars

Familiars bind to an altar and grant it a permanent boon. They orbit their altar as an idle, are immortal, and never despawn.

• Frugal — rites cost 50% less
• Bountiful — +25% chance of bonus output
• Capacious — +20,000 Fluxia reserve
• Balanced — a little of all three

If their altar is destroyed they walk to the nearest other altar on their own, or sit and wait if there isn't one. To release a familiar, use the new Soul Wisp — it ghosts away in a swirl of soul-light rather than dying.

Two familiars ship in 1.4.0: the Axolotl Familiar and the Wisp Familiar.

📈 Greater Vessels

The Fluxia Tablet now upgrades through infusion:

Tablet	Capacity	Throughput
Fluxia	20,000	base
Greater	100,000	8,000
Grand	500,000	32,000

Upgrading preserves whatever charge the tablet already held.

👓 Arcane Goggles & Network Visuals

New Arcane Goggles turn the Fluxia network into something you can actually read at a glance:

• Floating fill gauges above every node, with a bright leading edge so a slowly filling pool visibly moves, a shimmer when it tops out, and exact amount / capacity numbers once you're close enough to read them
• Flowing links between linked nodes, with evenly spaced pulses that make the direction of flow obvious
• Transfer arcs — every Fluxia transfer now draws a travelling mote of light with a comet tail, scaled to the size of the transfer

Look at an altar with the goggles on and it reports its tier, rune count, active boons, and — if the staged rite is out of reach — exactly which tier you still need. A rite you can't yet perform now says so plainly instead of failing silently.

📖 The Grimoire, Rewritten

The Patchouli guide has been rebuilt from scratch: 10 categories, 52 entries, generated directly from the same definitions that drive the recipes, so the book can no longer drift out of sync with the mod.

• Tier foundations now render as interactive multiblock previews you can project into the world
• Every ritual and infusion has a real entry with its circle layout, cost, and tier requirement
• All 12 rituals are documented across Minor, Major and Grand chapters

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🔧 Fixes

• Shader compatibility — goggle overlays, network links and transfer arcs were completely invisible with any shader pack (Iris/Optifine-style) enabled. Two causes: custom render types aren't in a shader pack's program mapping, and geometry drawn at the old render stage was being composited away. Everything now renders correctly with and without shaders.
• Chunk Loader would crash on world reload — the block entity was bound to the wrong class, throwing a ClassCastException the moment a saved chunk loader was read back.
• Chunk Loader was re-registering 81 chunk tickets every single tick — a severe hidden performance drain on any world with one placed.
• The altar never actually spent Fluxia performing rites.
• The altar renderer read server-only state, so ghost glyphs, staged reagents and the result preview never appeared for anyone.
• Fluid Exporter crashed when a bucket filter slot was left empty.
• 21 recipes were registered under the minecraft namespace instead of wispwillow, risking collisions with other mods.
• Willow Infusion was registered twice under a wrong mod id, and now runs on a sane interval instead of every tick.
• Transfer effects were sent twice to every nearby player, doubling network traffic for no visual benefit.
• Rune foundations no longer collide with ritual circles — the two occupy separate layers by design.
• Soil tags (Soils, Amethyst Farmland, Snad) now show readable names in EMI and JEI instead of raw tag ids.

⚡ Performance

• Fluxia and storage network scans rewritten onto primitive collections, removing a large amount of per-tick object churn on big networks
• Network traversal converted to an iterative queue, so deep cable runs no longer risk deep recursion
• Overlay rendering batches and flushes only its own geometry, leaving vanilla's render order untouched

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Known issue: Currently the runes are Temporary Textures.

Report bugs and send me issues. Thanks for playing! 💜