Shadowbind - Capture & Summon Shadow Minions

Kill it, and it may leave a shadow. Bind the shadow, and it fights for you.

Everything in this world casts one. Kill enough of them and the world starts walking behind you.

Server-side only. No client mod. No resource pack. Your players connect with a stock client and see all of it.

 Something leaves the body

Kill a creature and, now and then, it does not finish dying. The corpse tears open. A mote of it crosses the ground, finds you, and goes into the book you carry, and that thing's shadow belongs to you from then on.

Raise it and a dark copy of it stands up at your shoulder. Not a reskin. Not a pet with a wolf's numbers wearing a bear's face. The bear: its health, its reach, its attacks, the whole animal, black all through and yours.

Dismiss it when the work is done. Call it back tomorrow. From the moment you install this, every single thing you kill is a coin toss on whether you get to keep a piece of it, and you will start looking at the horizon differently.

 The world does not give up its best cheaply

Vermin come easily and come often. Climb, and the odds thin, the cold time between a shadow's death and its next raising stretches out, and one body starts costing more of you to hold. There are seven ranks. The thing at the top of them cannot be captured at all, by anyone, ever, and it is in this mod, and something is holding it.

Twenty slots is all you will ever have. What stands in them is the whole game: two enormous things and nothing else, or a wall of lesser ones. Both are real answers. Neither is free.

Nothing tells you which creatures are worth taking. You learn that the way you learn everything here.

They fight like the thing they came from

A summoned creature in Hytale swings for a flat five no matter what it is a copy of, which would make this whole mod a lie. Shadowbind digs each creature's true numbers out of the game's own files and holds it to them. And a mob your shadow hits turns and deals with your shadow, which sounds obvious, and is not, and changes what a fight feels like when there are six of them.

Two stances. Guard keeps a shadow at your heel and kills what comes to you. Hunt slips it off the leash to go and find something.

Squads you can save. Name a line-up and raise the whole thing with a word. A preset is a shopping list, not a reservation: it takes what it can and shrugs at what is still cold.

They grow. One echo can be fed a currency you already earn until it is a great deal worse to meet. And there is a rarer thing than that, torn off a boss and made nowhere, which lifts a single shadow an entire rank.

 You are not the only one doing this

Others bind shadows too. They have been at it longer than you, and when you meet them they are already mid-sentence.

Robed things walk the world in threes. They are going somewhere. They do not guard, they do not wait, and the instant they see you they haul something out of the dirt to stand between you and them, and then another, and another, for as long as you are polite enough to keep hitting the summons. Kill the summoner and the rest is meat.

Deeper in are the ones the wanderers answer to. One keeps a warband and whistles up a fresh one over the body of the last. One never lets you close enough to swing. You will not stumble into either. You have to be led to them, and the only thing that leads you there is taken off the cooling body of something smaller.

Everything they do to you, you can eventually do to them.

A tower. One of the wanderers is carrying a chart. Follow it and you go down, under six courses of rock, to whatever it is they are all walking toward.

A village that has already burned. Sixteen genuine Kweebec houses: hollowed living oaks, clay hearths, rope rails, raised on a plaza and then ruined. Something took this place. It has not left.