Bearing

Your body is a record of how you played, and the world reads you by what you have done. Bearing adds no items, no blocks, and no recipes. It changes what your body is, and it changes how everything alive reacts to you. There are no levels in this mod. Nothing you gain is a number you spend. Everything is something your body did, and everything can be lost by not doing it anymore.

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The body

Not a stat block. A simulation with a memory.

• Mass, from -100 to +100, moved by a real calorie economy. Eat above maintenance, and you build. Eat below it,t and you waste.
• Capacity, your stomach. It grows and shrinks. A big one holds food past a full hunger bar. A shrunken one physically cannot fill.
• Metabolism, which falls to defend you when you are starving, and crawls back long after the weight has returned.
• Height, inherited and chosen once, the only thing here you do not earn.
• Real collision. A heavy body is genuinely wider. A tall one sees the world from higher up, and struggles with a two-block gap.

Conditioning, 40 trainable adaptations

Mining hard rock builds arms. So does swinging a sword. Sprinting builds legs, taking hits builds toughness, time underwater builds lungs. Stop, and it fades. Most of them only grow while you are well fed. That is the loop that ties training to food. Some pay off in ways an attribute cannot:

• Delving, ore shows itself through stone
• Persistence, the human adaptation. Run something long enough and it tires before you do
• Throwing, everything you let go of goes further
• Forgework, what you kill comes out cooked

Mutations

At the far extremes the body stops adapting and changes. Permanent, and kept even if the track that produced it decays away to nothing.

Conditioning says what you have been doing lately.
A mutation says what you did once, so hard, that you never came all the way back.

Gills · Furnace Blood · Winter Skin · Night Eyes · Dead Nerve · Quick Knit · Spring Heels · Veiled

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Presence

Thirteen auras, and only your strongest projects. A butcher who also farms is read as whichever he does more of. An aura is something living things perceive about you and react to. If nothing reacts to it, it is conditioning, not presence.

• Bloodshed, earned by killing. Wounded things break and run from you.
• Dread, earned by killing where people can see. Rooms go quiet. Creepers flee, and detonate when you stare at them.
• Awe, earned by good done where people can see. People mend near you, and find they cannot make themselves leave.
• Decay, earned from carrion, withered smoke, and the company of the dead. The dead look straight through you.
• Succour, Husbandry, Verdure, Hearth, Sanctity, Quiet, Barter, Tide and Wandering, each with a signature nothing else in the mod can do.

Every aura has a top rung, and every top rung has a real cost. The butcher’s herd will not breed. The quiet man cannot be traded with. The wanderer cannot set a spawn point.

And it is personal

The world’s opinion colors how you read somebody. Only your own history with them carries weight.

• Regard, what one person remembers about you. Killing them escalates hard: -35, then -46, then -58, then -70.
• Familiarity, time spent near somebody wears their presence off. You get used to anybody eventually.
• Kinship, two butchers do not frighten each other. Nothing about either of them changed. The reader did.
• Resonance, spend enough time together and auras rub off. A crew converges on a shared presence.
• The kill ledger: someone with no aura at all can be the most frightening thing in one specific person’s world.

The bar rule: a frightening player walks in, and the room freezes, except the people who drink with him, who do not look up.

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Bonding

One mechanic, five surfaces: weapons, tools, armour, shields and companions. Ten levels, and what the bond buys is different every time. A sword gets sharper. A pickaxe gets faster and lasts longer. A wolf gets tougher and much harder to lose. Swing speed is a conversation between the arm and the weapon. A weapon wants roughly damage x 8 of arm strength, and anything below that is a chore to hold.

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Tolerance, marks and illness

The body adapts to what you do to it. Poison stops mattering if you live in it. Teleporting stops costing you once you've done enough of it. Past a point, the adaptation stops being reversible and leaves a mark. < p> And with overexposure, it becomes the Wasting, a long illness that drains you regardless of what you eat and stops you from training at all. The cure is a course of six doses on a schedule. It makes you weaker than the disease does while it runs, and finishing it costs you weight, stomach, and metabolism permanently.

You survive it. You do not undo it.

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Using it

/bearing                the full readout
J, or the pause menu    the body panel
/bearing set <x> <n>    testing

Everything lives in config/bearing-common.toml, 35 options, and every axis can be dialled to zero on its own. If you want the body and none of the presence, or the presence and none of the body, that is one line each. Anything that lets one player affect another is off by default, except Dread and Awe, whose entire content is affecting a room. Those are balanced by familiarity rather than by a cap.

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Requirements

Forge for Minecraft 1.20.1. No library dependencies. Not Pehkui, not GeckoLib, nothing.

Status

Alpha, and honestly so. Feature complete and played, but single player only. The multiplayer half of this mod, which is most of the presence system, has never had a second player in the world. Regard, kinship, resonance, and the stare-down all work in principle and have never been observed working. Bug reports from anybody willing to run it with a friend are worth more to me than anything else right now. MIT licensed.