TFC Warspire – Rising Banners

Warspire: Rising Banners

Warspire is a TerraFirmaCraft server where the politics are part of the game. This is the modpack you need to play on it.

Season 2 ran on scripts stacked on top of other people’s mods. For Season 3 we started over and wrote our own mod, a little over 50,000 lines of it, so that fealty, war and rebellion are things the server enforces instead of agreements in a Discord channel.

New to TerraFirmaCraft?

TFC rebuilds Minecraft as a slow, hard survival game. You knap your first knife out of a loose rock, fire clay moulds in a pit kiln and cast your first copper tools in them. Food rots, winter is cold, and the first bear you meet is a real problem. It takes a while to get going. By the time you own a sword you will know exactly what it cost, which is the point.

Realms

A crown is not free. Founding a realm takes 4 copper ingots, 8 charcoal, 8 flux and 4 leather, which is days of work when you’re new. Most players start out serving someone else’s realm, and plenty never leave.

A realm has ranks, a council, claimed land, its own flag and a chronicle the server writes as things happen to it. You run it from the Chancery, a book that opens with J. Outside a war, nobody else can dig into or build on your land.

Smaller realms can swear fealty to bigger ones, and vassals can rebel. Alliances are binding too: if an ally calls you to war and you don’t answer within 12 hours, you’re marked forsworn and can’t make or call on alliances for a week.

War

Every war is declared with a goal, and the goal limits what the loser can lose:

• Subjugation. Win, and the loser becomes your vassal. They keep their land, their name and their people.
• Humiliation. Win, and it goes into their chronicle. Nothing else changes hands.
• Conquest. Full annexation, allowed only against your own rebelling vassal or a realm already reduced to its capital.

The defender gets 24 hours’ warning to muster and call allies, then the campaign starts. Ground is taken by players standing on it. Your soldiers can hold a position and stop the enemy taking it, but they can’t capture anything for you. Afterwards there’s a 72-hour truce, and a newly founded realm can’t be attacked for its first 72 hours.

Soldiers

Soldiers come from camps out in the wilds. You’ll hear about one on the road, a rough bearing and a distance, and then you have to go and find it. Some camps open their gate to anyone. Most want a reason. A few never open, and you’ll learn which. Raid one and it holds a grudge against your realm.

Hired men eat from your stores and expect upkeep. You command them from a book that opens with R: formations, holding a position, guarding your town, marching, sieges. A realm at war can also hire a camp’s whole garrison on contract. The men are lent, not sold, and go back to their camp when the contract ends.

Sieges

Cannons, culverins, mortars, battering rams and ladders, crewed and driven by your soldiers. Before an assault your army scouts the target and proposes a way in: which gate to ram, where the ladders go, which stretch of wall to take. You look over the plan on a map in the command book, change what you don’t like, and send them in.

The land

The map is Earth, built with TFC: Real World. Europe, Africa and Asia are open, roughly 37,000 by 30,000 blocks between them. You choose your homeland when you first join.

Ore follows real geology, using sleeptightegger’s ore maps. About a third of the land has no iron at all, and more than a third has no tin. Copper turns up everywhere, so nobody is locked out of the bronze age, but every vein is small and you’ll be prospecting all season. If your valley has copper and no tin, you can trade for it, swear to whoever has it, or go and take it.

Also in the pack

Ships, muskets, Epic Knights armour, Better Combat, First Aid, proximity voice chat, and a live web map showing every realm’s borders. Around 160 mods in all.

Joining

1. Install the pack through the CurseForge app.
2. Give it at least 6 GB of memory in CurseForge’s Minecraft settings.
3. Connect to warspire.modpack.gg.
4. Join the Discord IF you want to play on the server: http://discord.gg/ha62ZyVR7N

The first time the game starts, it asks how you’d like it to look: textures, armour, the medieval font, music. If you’re not sure, leave everything ticked. The field guide in your inventory covers TFC, and its Realms & War chapter covers ours.

Fair warning

This pack is built for the Warspire server, and our mods are licensed for use there only. TFC is hard at the start and we haven’t made it easier. Wars happen, and sometimes you’ll lose one. Usually you come out of it a vassal, not a ruin.

Credits

TerraFirmaCraft and every mod and resource pack linked in this pack belong to their authors. Thanks to sleeptightegger for the ore maps, and to talhanation for Villager Recruits, which our armies are built on, and our developers which gave us the ideas and helped our community grow.