Astral Dice

Astral Dice — a dice-driven combat expansion for Minecraft 1.21.1 (NeoForge) and 1.20.1 (Forge).

Equip a dice and every melee attack rolls for a Dice Blessing: your attack roll is checked against the target’s defense roll, and the winner deals the damage. Around that core sit cards, signs, chips and four player resources that all feed back into the dice battle.

Core features

• Dice — 13 kinds. Upgrade from the Basic Dice up to the Nether Star Dice: Golden / Glass / Netherrack → Diamond / Emerald / Obsidian / Weird / Amethyst → Netherite / Crimson / Ender → Nether Star. Star upgrades (0–3) raise the cost pool and the number of card slots (0★ = 4, 1★ = 6, 2★ = 8, 3★ = 12, split evenly between attack and defense).
• Battle cards — 12 kinds (9 attack / 3 defense). They sit in the dice card inventory, add random points during a Dice Blessing, and each carries its own durability.
• Effect cards — 17 kinds. King’s Power, Berserk, Unwavering, Fight Poison with Poison, Monster Laser, Monster Brick, Orbital Strike, Directional Blast, Living Page, Fate’s Guidance, Barricade, Reinforced Repulsion and more. Each card tracks its own play count and cooldown cycle.
• Signs — 31 characters. Every sign has one passive and one active skill: Business, Sweeper, Guardian, Ninja, Vampire, Fengshui Master, Cult Leader, Oasis Queen, Mamushi, Mechanic, Bartender, Dorothy, Sister, Big Fat Fish, KAngel, Ame and others.
• Chips — 67 pieces. Passive curios such as Boxing Gloves, Speed Skates, Moto Helmet, Medkit, Magic Quiver, Electric Sword, Star Coin Hammer, Cutter and Flashlight. They grant attack, defense, movement speed, health, starlight and other bonuses.
• Player resources. Healing points, starlight, mark stacks and charge stacks — four systems that interact with signs and chips.
• Combat HUD. Dedicated Attack Power and Defense bars drawn on the vanilla armor row, and Jade shows this mod’s Defense value instead of vanilla armor.

What is new in 1.5.0

• Six new signs: KAngel and Ame (Bizarre quality, sharing the “One Body, One Soul” team note), plus Bartender, Dorothy, Sister and Big Fat Fish.
• Two new effect cards: Barricade (a 30-durability body with a fence-height collision block that pulls aggro) and Reinforced Repulsion (exclusive, 100 durability, clamps hostile targets inside an aura with Slowness and Weakness).
• New chips: Flashlight — Burst, Fortune Stick, Reagent — Abyss, Wireless Transmission Pole and Sensor Device.
• Card Shop and Chip Shop blocks, each a villager job site, so villagers can become Card Traders and Chip Traders and sell cards or chips by level.
• Event system rewritten around a unified name / icon / type / tier / scope model with per-event timers, plus twelve new events (Red-Heat Warning, Swift Stride, Storm Approaching, Learn from Others, Shop Bonanza, Hand Erasure, World Collapse, Gift from the Sky, Angel Descent, Problem Delivery, Crowded Passage, Battle Frenzy). The Strange Question Mark item and the Lottery Box block draw events on demand.
• Cards are traded, not crafted: the old card crafting recipes are gone; cards come from shops and traders, and exclusive / Pinnacle / Bizarre cards never enter shops or trades.
• Shop rules reworked: a 60-second cycle, a fresh batch only when the shelf is empty, one transfer and one starlight exchange per cycle, and reopening no longer rerolls the shelf.
• Sign internals consolidated (sign-hook dispatcher, shared equip checks, unified attribute and effect application, ten sign attachments merged into one), with the shared utility layer moved into the StarEngine library.
• Five new custom sound effects, the 179-sprite Iron Elden Ring particle library, and a batch of fixes (firearm damage attribution, laser and explosion damage entries, Living Page stacking, Medkit refill on relog, guidebook rarities).

Supported versions

Both builds are release lines kept at feature parity, and both jars ship with every release. These are the only published builds — there is no build for any other Minecraft version or loader.

Required dependencies

• StarEngine (mod id starengine, currently 1.1.0) — download it separately from its own CurseForge project and put the matching jar (starengine-neoforge-1.21.1-1.1.0.jar / starengine-forge-1.20.1-1.1.0.jar) into your mods folder next to this mod. It is not bundled. The accepted range is [1.1.0, 2.0.0); a missing or older library aborts startup with Missing or unsupported mandatory dependencies.
• Curios API — 9+ on 1.21.1, 5.x on 1.20.1 Forge. A missing or too-old Curios is rejected during dependency sorting.
• A Mixin runtime (1.20.1 Forge only) — either Mixin Booster 0.1.3+ or Sinytra Connector. If your pack already ships Sinytra Connector, nothing else is needed; when neither is present the mod refuses to start and explains what to install.

Optional

• Patchouli — the in-game guide book.
• Bountiful — bounty board integration.

Installation

1. Install the loader for your Minecraft version (NeoForge 21.1 for 1.21.1, Forge 47.4.10 for 1.20.1) and the required dependencies above.
2. Drop the matching astral_dice-*.jar into your mods folder — pick the file whose loader and Minecraft version match your instance, and pair it with the StarEngine jar of the same loader.
3. Launch. If a required dependency is missing or too old, the mod refuses to start and names exactly what to install.

Links

• Source & issue tracker: https://github.com/merlin-kitsune/astral_dice
• Releases (changelogs, both builds): https://github.com/merlin-kitsune/astral_dice/releases
• StarEngine library: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/starengine