Gottsch Books

Gottsch Books

Books for your mods, written in Markdown.

Gottsch Books is a small library for in-game books: lore books to find and collect, and mod manuals with
categories, entries, pictures and recipes. You write the text in plain Markdown files, and players read it in a
vanilla-styled book.

Simple by design. There’s no JSON page format to learn. If you’ve written a README, a Discord message or a
Reddit post, you already know how to write a book: one Markdown file per book (or per manual entry), and you’re done.
When you want more, a few small extras are there to use: colours, item pictures, recipes, tables. However, a book
doesn’t require any of them.

Did a mod ask you to install this? Then that’s all you need to do. Gottsch Books has no dependencies of its own.

📖 Two Kinds of Book

📜 Lore Books

One text, read front to back. A title page shows the icon, title and author, followed by the story with ornaments
between sections and illustrated items along the way. Hover over a picture to see the item’s tooltip.

📘 Manuals

A guide with a contents page, categories and entries:

• Spotlights: an item shown large and framed, with its description underneath
• Recipes: drawn the way their block shows them (a crafting grid, a furnace with its cooking time, a stonecutter,
  a smithing table, or a mod’s own machine), cycling through every accepted ingredient
• Tables: with item icons in their cells, on two pages or one wide page
• Images and mobs: any texture, or a mob slowly turning on the page
• Links between entries and to the exact heading you want, with Back and Contents buttons
• Locked entries that stay hidden until the player earns an advancement

In both kinds, the text flows onto as many pages as it needs, so nothing runs off a page in any language or window
size.

🎨 Your Own Look

Each book can wear its own skin: three small textures for the cover, the pages and the section ornaments. Give a
ship’s log sea-blue leather, or a grimoire black and silver, by naming a texture folder in the book’s book.md.

✍️ Written in Markdown

---
title: An Old Diary
author: A Lost Traveller
---

The first day. The road was longer than the map said.

---

The second day. I found a **ring** in the {dark_aqua}river{}.

![](item:minecraft:gold_ingot)

That file is a whole book: no page numbers to manage, no layout to work out, no build step. You get italic, bold, colours, headings, lists, notes, ornaments and page breaks.
Mistakes show up as plain text, so a stray character never breaks a page.

Translations sit next to the English as their own files. Each file falls back to English on its own, so a
translation can be partial. Press F3+T in game to reload books while you write.

📦 No Code Needed

A book is all data: a resource pack holds the text, and a datapack holds the book’s entry. Modpack makers can ship
their own guide without writing a mod:

🤖 Let an AI Write It

Have docs, a wiki or a README already? An AI can turn them into a whole manual, in any chat AI, free plans included
(claude.ai, ChatGPT, Gemini…).

1. Give the AI AI-INSTRUCTIONS.md
   with your docs and your item ids, and say what you want.
2. Save its replies and run split-book.py
   (or split-book.ps1 on Windows without Python), which writes every file into your mod or resource pack.
3. In game, run /gottschbooks check to list anything missing, and hand the list back to the AI.

The instructions keep the AI to the book format and stop it from inventing item ids: anything it couldn’t fill in,
it lists for you instead. The README’s Writing books with an AI section walks through every step.

🏆 Advancements

The gottschbooks:book_read trigger lets you reward reading:

• a single book
• every book in a tag, such as “Read all the diaries”
• every book from one mod
• any book at all

The game remembers which books each player has read, and the record survives death.

🧩 For Mod Developers

• Your own book items: register a BookItem, or use one item for many books.
• Your own picture schemes: have ![](preset:mymod:some_id) draw any stack your mod can build.
• Opening a book from code: GottschBooksClient.open(...).
• Bundling it: nest it in your jar with Jar-in-Jar, or depend on it optionally if your mod only has a manual.
• Backwards compatible: every 1.x release keeps working with books and code written for 1.0.

The full guide covers file layout, every Markdown feature, server entries and build setup:
Writing books for Gottsch Books

🔌 Compatibility

• NeoForge 1.21.1 and Forge 1.20.1. Both use the same book format.
• Install it on both client and server.
• No dependencies.
• Used by Magic Treasures for its lore books and manual.

📚 Source, Issues & Discord

GitHub · Discord · Licensed under the LGPL v3

Questions, ideas, or a book you’d like to show off? Come say hello on Discord.