Ars 'n Spells

[3.2.4] - 2026-09-02

Parity with the Forge 1.20.1 3.2.3 and 3.2.4 lines. The ritual bugs below were present identically on both trees; two of the 3.2.4 performance items were already fixed in this port.

Fixed: the ritual brazier never finished an Ars 'n' Spells ritual, so four rituals did nothing

• Placing a Spellbook Binding, Spell Transcription, Spell Uninscription or Mana Infusion tablet on a Ritual Brazier and lighting it did nothing at all: no items consumed, no result, no error message, and the brazier stayed lit indefinitely. Every one of these rituals had been inert since 3.0.0.
• Ars Nouveau only runs a ritual's payload once the ritual marks itself finished - the brazier calls onEnd() exclusively when RitualContext.isDone is set, and the only thing that sets it is a ritual calling setFinished() from its own tick(). All four of these rituals shipped with an empty tick(), so they burned forever and never reached their payload. They now run for about three seconds and then complete. Ritual tablets are not returned, matching Ars's own rituals.
• This went unnoticed because both the documentation and the automated tests reached for /ans bind_scroll_to_irons_book instead, which was never affected. New GameTests now drive a real brazier through the full light-burn-complete lifecycle, and assert that every one-shot ritual actually finishes.

Fixed: ritual failure messages were silently dropped if you walked away

• A ritual's chat feedback went to the nearest player within 8 blocks at the moment it completed. Since a ritual now visibly burns for a few seconds, a player who lit it and stepped away got no message at all - success or failure. Rituals now remember who lit them (persisted across chunk unloads and restarts) and report to that player wherever they are, falling back to proximity only for redstone-triggered rituals.
• The binding ritual's advancement used a 16-block radius while its messages used 8, so a player twelve blocks out silently earned the advancement while being told nothing. Both now resolve the same player.

Fixed: /ans bind_scroll_to_irons_book ignored the binding kill switch

• Setting allow_ars_spells_in_irons_spellbooks=false blocked the ritual but not the command, so the feature stayed available to operators on servers that had switched it off. The command now refuses too.
• The ritual also checked that setting only after validating the dropped items, so on a server with binding disabled you were told "unexpected item(s) in range" or "drop a carrier scroll and a spell book" - troubleshooting advice for a ritual that was never going to run. It now says the feature is disabled straight away.

Changed: Spellbook Binding documentation

• The in-game tablet description had not been updated since before 3.0.0. It pointed at Spell Transcription for making carrier scrolls (the Spell Loom has been the survival path since 3.0.0) and claimed bound spells cast with right-click and sneak-right-click (they cast from Iron's native spell wheel). Rewritten, and it now states the "nothing else in range" rule the ritual actually enforces.
• The README, mod page and testing guide now say that the ritual reads dropped items rather than your inventory, give the three-block radius, note that any other item in range aborts the run, and explain that you light a brazier by right-clicking it with an empty hand. They also warn that Ars Nouveau ships its own ritual named literally Binding - a different ritual that makes Bound Scripts for familiars and ignores scrolls - which is easy to reach for by mistake.

Performance: server-side hot paths trimmed

• The Mana Well ritual scanned every entity section within its range (configurable up to 64 blocks) on every world tick for as long as the brazier stayed lit. It now walks the level's player list and tests each player against the same box, so an idle well costs almost nothing.
• The potion regen bridge asked NeoForge's ModList whether Iron's Spellbooks was loaded on every call, before its own gates. That lookup streams the whole mod list. It now uses the mod's cached answer, and the Source Jar regen synergy handler checks side before anything else.
• The shared-pool mana ceiling early-return and the change-gating of the resonance sync were already present in this port and needed no change.
• Port-only: the log-throttle table is now drained alongside the other static state stores when the server stops, so an integrated server does not carry it into the next world.

No gameplay behaviour changes beyond the ritual fixes above. No config, packet, or save-format changes.