A touch of Darkness

A Touch of Darkness

This mod as the other series of A touch of is inspired by one of the game Don’t Starve mechanics: the dark is dangerous and can kill you.

If you play in survival and the light at your eyes drops below 5 you get ten seconds there before the Babau strikes. You never see it, and it hits for 10 damage on Normal, then again every ten seconds until you find light. A full moon keeps you safe under open sky unless it rains, and the End’s sky always does. Night Vision doesn’t count.

Light is now something you carry and feed. Vanilla’s torches, lanterns, candles, campfires, glowstone and the rest have no recipe, and redstone torches, glow lichen and amethyst give no light at all. Any vanilla torch, lantern or campfire you pick up becomes the mod’s own item. A Torch lights you only while held in hand, and it burns out in five minutes. You can relight a spent torch once with flint and steel or any fire, for a quarter of the time. Campfires and Lamps take any furnace fuel. A Lamp holds a day’s worth, you can carry it or place it, and it burns only while it’s on.

The Dark also gives something back. Holding a Spent Torch while you’re in the Dark slowly darkens it into a Nightbrand, one per player per day. Set a Lamp on a gold block and kindle it with a Torch, and it becomes the Lampad, a small robed figure who tends your Lamps. The gold becomes her Votive, where you leave fuel, gold nuggets and a Nightbrand. She carries the fuel to every placed Lamp nearby. Each week she takes a Nightbrand to stay bound, plus a nugget for every eight Lamps she looks after, and without one she stands still as a statue. She can be hurt, and when she is she stops working and goes to heal in the dark.

For pack authors

• Where the Dark falls is the dimension type tag atouchofdarkness:dark, by default the Overworld, the Nether and the End.
• Where the sky always lights is the dimension type tag atouchofdarkness:sky_always_lit, by default the End. Elsewhere the open sky lights only under a full moon without rain.
• Unlit blocks are the block tag atouchofdarkness:unlit: they give no light at all, for players, mobs and other mods. A pack can add another mod’s lamp to it.
• The Strike is the damage type atouchofdarkness:strike, so its scaling and death messages follow the damage type’s data.
• Vanilla’s light comes back with the vanillaLight switch below: the recipes of vanilla’s torches, lanterns, candles, campfires and other cheap light, and the light of the Unlit blocks, whose tag it empties.

The terms are in GLOSSARY.md, and what each release changed for a pack is in CHANGELOG.md.

Configuration

Both files are common configs, in config/. Times are in ticks, 20 to a second.

• atouchofdarkness-common.toml, the Dark: litThreshold, the light at a player’s eyes at or above which they are Lit (5); gracePeriod (200), refillDelay (40), strikeDamage on Normal before armour (10) and strikeInterval (200).
• atouchofdarkness-light.toml, the lights: vanillaLight (off); torch.burnTime (6000, the soul Torch twice as long); campfire.cap (12000) and lamp.cap (24000), each doubled for its soul kind; nightbrand.gracePeriods (3); lampad.binding (168000, seven days) and lampad.lampsPerNugget (8).

The numbers are provisional while A Touch of Darkness is below 1.0.

Compatibility

All optional, and none nested in the jar:

• Jade shows a placed Campfire’s fuel left and the light it gives, and a placed Lamp’s on or off and its fuel left.
• EMI shows information pages on fuelling the lights, relighting a Spent Torch, vanilla’s lights becoming the mod’s own, the Nightbrand, the Lampad and her Votive, and the vanillaLight switch.
• Tough As Nails: a lit Campfire warms those near it and a lit Soul Campfire cools them.

Dependencies

None beyond NeoForge, on Minecraft 26.1.2.

License

Per file: the code is LGPL-3.0-only and the content, textures and docs CC BY 4.0, as LICENSE says. Source is on GitHub. The Votive’s and the Lampad’s textures are built from Malcolm Riley’s unused-textures, under CC BY 4.0; NOTICE credits each.

This is a hobby project: I’m not monetizing any part of A touch of mods suite. I’m building it for fun, to see how far I can take it.