Botania: Guardian Killer

Botania Guardian Killer

An addon for Botania adding the Gaia Slayer — a legendary sword forged specifically to hunt down Gaia Guardians (tier 1 and tier 2). The sword levels up from kills, has a cooldown on its signature ability, and grants an increasing chance at a rare bonus reward as it levels up.

⚠️ Note: this mod is primarily designed as a piece for large modpacks with a deep overhaul of vanilla crafting and progression — nearly all of its balance (crafting cost, kills required, drop chances, cooldown) lives in the config specifically so a pack can tune it to its own economy. That said, the mod is fully functional on its own with sensible default values — you don't need anything else installed on top of it.

⚔ Gaia Slayer

• Deals damage and attacks at the same speed as a regular diamond sword.
• Any hit against a Gaia Guardian (tier 1 or tier 2) kills it instantly, as long as the sword isn't on cooldown.
• After an instant kill, the sword enters a cooldown — the higher its level, the shorter the cooldown (60 seconds at level 1 down to 5 seconds at level 20 by default).
• Killing Guardians raises the sword's level (1–20) — the level is always recalculated on the fly from the total kill count, so changing the config never breaks an already-leveled sword.
• The tooltip shows the current level, kills remaining to the next level, total Guardians slain, cooldown duration, remaining cooldown time, and the current bonus-drop chance.

🧵 Yarn — bonus loot

Every instant kill has a chance (grows with the sword's level, 1%→20% by default) to trigger a "lucky roll". If it succeeds, each of the three yarn types is then rolled independently (50% each by default):

• Asgard Yarn
• Midgard Yarn
• Niflheim Yarn

Anywhere from 0 to all 3 types can drop at once, 2-5 of each (range configurable).

There are currently no recipes that require yarn. For modpacks, though, it can serve as an additional hard-to-get resource.

🔨 Crafting

The sword is forged at Botania's Runic Altar for 1,000,000 mana.

Like the altar's standard mechanic, runes are not consumed. By default, the rings are also returned to the player intact after forging (this is toggleable in the config if you want a harsher recipe).

The recipe and a full description of the sword are also added as a standalone entry directly in the Lexica Botania book, under the Elvenmancy category.

⚙️ Flexible config

Almost all of the mod's balance lives in botania_guardian_killer-common.toml:

• levelUpKillRequirements — total kills needed to reach each level (1–20).
• instantKillCooldownSeconds — instant-kill cooldown duration per level.
• gaiaYarnDropChancePercent — chance of the "lucky roll" for bonus loot per level.
• yarnTypeDropChancePercent, yarnDropMinAmount, yarnDropMaxAmount — details of each yarn type's drop.
• consumeRingsOnCraft — whether the rings are consumed on craft (false by default).

This lets a modpack tune the progression to its own pace without touching any code.

📦 Dependencies

• Botania
• Patchouli
• Curios