Join my Discord Server if you have any questions. Please report any problems or ideas you have on the Issue Tracker. This mod requires Rift and ProtoCharset to work.

Better Beacons makes the composition of your beacon matter! You can no longer make a beacon entirely out of iron, and expect the same results as a diamond beacon. In order to accomplish this, the mod makes several changes. The first of these is that beacons now require a Conduit instead of a Nether Star to craft:

Beacon Crafting Recipe

Don't worry - you will still need nether stars to activate your beacon! To allow for this, as well as for the new power system, beacons now have a very different GUI.

Each material used to construct beacons has theme, and as you increase the amount of each material in the pyramid, new effects based on their theme are added. There are five tiers for each material, represented by the five items in the GUI. To make it easy to understand, here is a list which correlates the number of blocks used in a category to tier shown in the GUI.

Tier 1: At least four blocks of the material represented in the pyramid
Tier 2: 16 or more blocks of the material
Tier 3: 48 blocks or more
Tier 4: 96 blocks or more
Tier 5: The entire pyramid must be made out of the material (164 blocks)

Once you have constructed your beacon and are ready to activate it, you need one ingot/gem from the category you want to activate (either an iron ingot, golden ingot, diamond or emerald), as well as a nether star. Place the two items into the marked slots in the beacon interface, and if you meet the requirements for at least Tier 1 of the category you want to activate, the green check-mark should become available to press, as seen in the image below.

Once you press the green tick, the category will be activated and the resources are consumed. You can activate more than one category, however, unlike vanilla beacons, but this will require a nether star for every category you want to activate. Once a category is activated, you can add more of the respective material to the beacon without needing to use more nether stars and it will increase the amount of effects granted by the beacon. A beacon with multiple categories activated can look like this

A lot of the effects haven't been implemented yet, but the currently available ones are listed below. Some unfinished ones have been marked in bold as not implemented just to give an example of what is to come.

Offensive (Iron)

Tier 1: Strength status effect
Tier 2: Faster attack cool-down and Strength II
Tier 3: Nearby players receive Fast Attack II and Strength II. Nearby Snow/Iron Golems receive Strength I
Tier 4: NOT IMPLEMENTED YET Snow/Iron Golems in the area recieve Strength II, and now cannot die. When their health reaches 0 they fall asleep and require a player to awaken them, as well as everything from Tier 3
Tier 5: NOT IMPLEMENTED YET Your beacon will shoot down nearby hostile mobs with a powerful beam, as well as everything from the previous tiers.

Quality of Life (Gold)

Tier 1: Speed I status effect
Tier 2: Speed II and Jump Boost I
Tier 3: Speed II, Jump Boost II and Haste I
Tier 4: Speed II, Jump Boost II, and Haste II
Tier 5: Greater Reach Distance as well as all the effects of Tier 4

Defensive (Diamond)

Tier 1: Resistance status effect
Tier 2 and above are not implemented yet

The unimplemented effects will come soon. BetterBeacons is entirely based off this YouTube video which is where the idea came from.