Runebound

Runebound adds in a new mechanic to combat, binding runes to your weapons, granting you new abilities to use in solo or co-op PVE.

You can use the new Binding Table to bind a rune to your weapon, giving you access to a new ability that uses runic energy. The abilities range from a passive crit chance or elemental damage resistance to active rockfall attacks or the ability to heal allies, but they all cost runic energy. Every rune has its own way to generate runic energy, displayed on its tooltip.

One rune not enough for you? You can make runic weapons or an Apprentice Staff that can have two runes at once, and those two runes share energy. But making runic weapons needs Runic Ingots, which require you to sacrifice some of your runestones. Late-game, you can make a Runic Staff, capable of using three runes with a boost to power and energy efficiency, and there may be another way to get an extra rune slot even later in the game…

How do you even get runes? Simple, you can find them in chests in most vanilla structures, from high-level cleric or weaponsmith villagers, piglin bartering, or occasionally as drops from specific mobs (such as elder guardians or the Wither). Simple, not easy though, as runes are fairly uncommon, and each rune can only generate in specific locations, sometimes requiring you to go to the Nether or the End for the rune you want.

Once you have several Runic Ingots, you can turn them into armor to increase the power and cooldown speed of your runes. You could also use them to modify a Totem of Undying and summon the Runebound Specter. If you can overcome its barrage of runic spells, you can claim a bounty of runestones to recover the cost of summoning it, and you will get a special item that can boost a weapon’s affinity for runes.

In addition to runestones, Runebound also adds in three new tiered weapon types, sabers, battleaxes, and glaives, from iron to netherite tiers. All of them are balanced for use with Better Combat to specialize in attack speed, damage, or reach. You may find that some runes pair better with certain weapons than others.

Notes:

Using a rune’s ability will usually temporarily reduce or even stop generation of runic energy, especially passive generation.

All passive rune abilities can be toggled off with a keybinding.

Runebound considers all players to be allies, as such, runes that apply benefits in an AOE, such as Ehwaz, will target all players.

Player animations in screenshots are from daedelus_dev’s Better Combat mod.

You can block the Runebound Specter’s beam attack with the Algiz or Fehu Runestones, or you can avoid it by getting behind cover.

For mod and pack authors:

Rune slots on weapons and the rune power and efficiency increase of staffs are based on tags.

The tag runebound:rune_valid allows runes to be applied to an item. It automatically recognizes most modded weapons that can be enchanted.

The runebound:double_rune and runebound:triple_rune tags allow two or three runes respectively to be applied to a valid item.

The runebound:rune_boost_minor and runebound:rune_boost_moderate tags increase both the power and energy efficiency of runes bound to a tagged item. In addition, they cause tagged armor to increase rune power and cooldown speed when worn.

There is a built-in anti-cheese mechanic for the stun effect of the Nauthiz Runestone. However, if that or the Wunjo Runestone break an entity from another mod, you can add that entity to the runebound:stun_immune tag.