Celestial Survey

Celestial Survey

> ⚠️ Read before downloading.
>
> Celestial Survey is in active early development and will be for a long time. As of right now, only the decorative and early science blocks actually function in any real sense. The bigger pieces (full survey gameplay loop, anomaly board, black holes, dimensions, custom planets and systems) are either scaffolded or not in yet.
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> This page is public so people running the Ascension of Ages modpack can find the mod and follow along. It is not intended for general installation right now. Please don’t file bug reports, ask for support, or report compatibility issues. If you want to poke at the jar out of curiosity, go ahead, but you’re on your own until this disclaimer comes down. I do not say this to be rude, but Ascension of Ages is my top priority right now. Please join the discord to see roadmap updates, updates to the mod, and if you’d like to discuss it more I’m happy to. I just can’t guarantee anything will be implemented anytime soon. I’m expecting about a year for development to v1.0

A NeoForge 1.21.1 science mod for Minecraft. You point instruments at the sky, collect raw data, run it through processing equipment, and earn certified proofs of what you observed. It’s built primarily for the Ascension of Ages modpack and integrated into that pack’s progression. General standalone use is planned once the wider feature set is in, including custom planets, star systems, and deeper space progression than other mods have ever touched. 

Current version: v0.2.3.

How it plays

Real astrophysics drives the math behind the scenes, but the player-facing language stays plain. A quest asks you to “identify what a distant star is made of,” not to perform absorption-line spectroscopy. The scientific terms live in item tooltips and the in-game compendium for anyone who wants the deep version.

Items move in three tiers. Raw data items like Moon Dust drop from instruments and are freely re-acquirable. Processed items like Lunar Survey Notes come out of analysis machines. Canonical proof items are the certified, gate-relevant artifacts, and they’re also written to a persistent **Proof Ledger** that survives death, /clear, and lost items. If you ever lose a proof, run `/aoacs reissue` and get it back.

What ships in v0.2.3

* Observatory** processes Moon Dust samples into Lunar Survey Notes
* Light Reader** analyzes notes and starlight, certifies Verified Lunar Survey and Verified Starlight Reading
* Starlight Prism** collects starlight samples under valid sky conditions (night, clear weather, charge)
* Twin Sighting Marker** runs a parallax puzzle requiring two markers at sufficient distance
* Mission Console** combines three certified proofs into your First Orbital Manifest
* Player-scoped **Proof Ledger** with full `/aoacs` command suite
* KubeJS bridge so pack authors can read proof state and react to mint events

Roadmap to v1.0

v0.3. Anomaly Board.** A working detection system with three observation patterns: Beacon Stars (pulsars), Flash Signals (fast radio bursts), and Space Ripples (gravitational waves). Plus a red herring called Glare in the Glass to keep you honest. Anomalies are datapack-defined, so packs can add their own.

v0.4a. Black Hole Hazard.** Black holes appear in the world as entities with zone-based gravitational pull, server-authoritative physics, accretion disk particles, and a screen distortion shader with graceful degradation for low-end hardware.

v0.4b. Certification Chain.** Deep Space Array locates anomalies. Gravity Calibration Chamber certifies a safe approach. Anomaly Containment Array stabilizes Hawking samples. Five new Tier 3 proofs.

v0.4c. Pocket and Rift.** Crossing the event horizon branches on whether you’ve earned the certification chain. Certified players reach the Anomaly Pocket. Uncertified players land in the Causal Rift with a documented escape path. From here, the mod transitions the player into the next stage of the Ascension chain.

v0.5. Multiplayer and Performance.** Four-player stress testing, particle pooling, chunkload audits, ledger concurrency tests.

v0.6. Polish and Compatibility.** JEI and EMI recipe integration, full Modonomicon guidebook, RS and AE2 proof indexing, advancement tree, sound and visual passes. Optional integrations with Mekanism, PneumaticCraft, and Curios may slip to v1.0.x if they get risky.

v0.7. Release Candidate.** Final naming pass after playtest data, pack integration verification, full-progression playthrough.

v1.0. Public release.**

Beyond 1.0

These ideas didn’t fit into a stable 1.0 and will ship as separate expansions after release.

v1.1. Spinning Black Holes.** Kerr geometry, frame dragging (Twist Pull), and the ergosphere (Twist Region) as a region you can actually stand in.

v1.2. Penrose Endgame.** Spin Tap energy extraction from rotating black holes as an ultra-late-game power source. Outputs to FE by default. Other mod integrations are possible but not guaranteed.

v1.3. Speculative Anomalies.** Universe Crack (vacuum decay), Sky Thread (cosmic strings), Echo Loop (causal loops). The ones astrophysicists still argue about. Multiplayer safety on vacuum decay is mandatory before this one ships.

v1.4. Deep Space Horror.** The further out you push, the less alone you feel. Creatures that live in the dark between stars, ambient dread instead of action-movie combat, and encounters that punish overconfidence. Ship-to-ship and ship-to-creature battles are a hoped-for stretch within this version, but not promised.

v1.5 and onward.** Community-authored datapack content, localization, additional anomaly types.

Notes on stability

Backend item IDs have been stable since v0.0 and will stay stable through 1.0. Some forthcoming display names for v0.4 content are tagged as playtest-pending and may change before the v0.7 naming audit. Save compatibility is a hard requirement: no canonical proof ID will ever be deleted or repurposed.

License: All Rights Reserved.