Boundless Bounties

Throughout your world, you'll find various Hunter Lodges, unique to each biome. (Currently the plains, savanna, and taiga. More are planned). They're pretty easy to find, but each lodge only generates once. At the center of each lodge is a Bounty Box, a special block that allows you to keep track of your current mission, and collect your rewards. They also serve as a spawning center for the lodge's Bounty Hunters, who call the place home.

• When you accept a mission from a bounty hunter, the bounty box will update with your current objectives, and will dispense a Bounty Book, containing instructions for your current bounty. A bounty can require you to deposit items in the box, kill things, travel to a specific biome, craft specific items, mine specific blocks, or plant specific crops, and the bounty box displays your current scores for each task, as well as any items you need to provide.
• Your Rank determines which level of bounties you can take; initially, only the easiest level is available. Each time you successfully complete eight bounties, you rank up to the next level. Dying or failing to complete a bounty on time decreases your rank.
• Once you've completed a bounty, the bounty box dispenses a Medallion based on that bounty's rank. More difficult bounties will score rarer medallions, which can be exchanged with bounty hunters for better rewards. The highest level of Cursed medallions isn't obtainable through natural means, but might be won through some alternative means, which may or may not involve the mysterious statue hidden in each lodge.
• If you want to create your own lodge, you can craft a custom bounty box using an echo shard. 

An elusive gardener with a knack for exotic plants; the botanist's missions tend to involve farming, with an occasional bit of travel or monster hunting thrown in for good measure.

• In exchange for medallions, the botanist offers various Gemstone Crops, including carrots, potatoes, beetroot, and apples; with copper, iron, gold, emerald, amethyst, lapis, and diamond variants. Gem Beetroots provide a short, powerful burst of their respective status effect when eaten; Gem Carrots provide a longer, lower level status effect, and potatoes can be smelted into their respective material.
• More importantly, the Botanist offers different varieties of Mulch, which can be applied to soil in order to grow different gemstone crops. Gem crops take significantly longer to grow, but provide a new incentive to focus on farming, and a means of farming minerals in a somewhat more vanilla friendly, (probably slightly unbalanced) sort of way.

A clever librarian with an affinity for old books; the archivist's missions almost always involve enchanting stuff, presumably for science. 

• In exchange for medallions, the archivist offers Mystic Pages, which apply a single level of their respective enchantment to an item, allowing for more precise enchanting, and otherwise incompatible combinations of enchantments. 
• Perhaps more curiously, the archivist can provide Magic Scrolls, special items that unlock a unique magical spell. Only one scroll can be active at a time, and each provides a different effect, drawing on the player's Experience bar for power.
• The Scroll of Hivefriend summons an angry bee when its wielder is attacked, and has a 15% chance to spawn an additional bee for each additional attack.
• The Scroll of Whirling replaces the right-click ability of melee weapons with a ranged, magical slash that sends foes hurtling backwards.
• The Scroll of Prongs causes a melee weapon's right-click ability to summon spinning spike-circle that follows its wielder, launching any nearby foes backwards with considerable force.
• The Scroll of Drifting replaces the right-click ability with a powerful forwards dash, launching the player in the direction they're looking, and briefly damaging anything the wielder hits.
• The Scroll of Smashing unlocks a right-click ability that sends the player hurtling downwards, and produces a powerful shockwave on impact, dealing damage proportional to their fall distance.
• The Scroll of Specters randomly teleports the player a couple blocks each time they land an attack, while facing them towards their target, making for a powerful (but disorienting) confusion tactic.
• The Scroll of Pillars unlocks a right-click ability that summons a temporary spire of ghostly blocks, launching anything beneath it.
• And lastly, the Scroll of Hexohedrons unlocks a right-click ability that summons a large cube of ghostly blocks, either creating a solid obstruction in midair, or phasing through solid ground.

A strong-silent type, who's repurposed themselves for a life of minerals. The geologist's missions invariably involve mining.

• In exchange for medallions, the Geologist offers various building materials, along with Chisels, special items that allow the player to chisel unique patterns into stone blocks.
• There are currently nine different chisels, (Caveat, Nexus, Hieroglyph, Skull, Groan, Snout, Doom, Etch, and Spiral), each of which corresponds to one of the vanilla chiseled stone patterns. They can be used to carve that pattern into any processed stone block. (Stone bricks, quartz, sandstone, red sandstone, red and standard nether bricks, blackstone, granite, andesite, diorite, tuff, and deepslate.) 
• In addition, the Geologist offers Gemstone Insets, allowing you to decorate chiseled stone with various minerals. (Copper, Iron, Gold, Emerald, Lapis, Amethyst, Glowstone, Redstone, and Diamond.) Redstone insets become lit when the block is interacted with, amethyst insets glow with optifine installed, glowstone insets convert the block to a light source, and copper insets age gradually through four states, and can be waxed to preserve their current appearance.
• This amounts to a grand total of 972 combinations, not counting the multiple variants of copper, which I will say would have been a bit less time consuming with some sort of arbitrary overlay system, but I digress. If you wanna decorate your entire castle with shiny diamond insets, without just building the thing out of garrish diamond blocks, that is now something you can do, show-off. 

A refined traveler hailing from the netherworld, with a taste for unusual artifacts. The collector doesn't ask for much, but his requests tend to be a bit obscure...

• In exchange for medallions, the collector offers a slightly less absurd means of obtaining music discs, along with Jewelry, an alternative to armor that provides stacking status effects, in exchange for significantly less protection, and quite a lot more style. Lapis, Emerald, Amethyst, Diamond, and Ancient jewelry are available; offering speed, jump boost, regeneration, haste, and strength respectively; each effect scales significantly if you can obtain the full set. 
• (I'm going to be totally honest, this was thrown together about four hours before the due date on a whim, but that's not something anyone needs to know. I trust you to keep it between the two of us. =) 

An aspiring little monster hunter with a doubtlessly dark and troubled past, whose requests tend to be pretty straightforward, and tend to involve murdering things. 

• In exchange for medallions, the hunter offers Essences, which allow you to summon different types of monsters, and rare Mob Guts, which allow you to gain the marks of different monsters. (You've also got a rare chance of nabbing these when you kill a monster yourself.) 
• While under the influence of a Mark, you control monsters of that mark's type. With the Mark of Undeath, granted by eating a Rotten Heart, you control zombies and skeletons; with the Mark of Arthropods, granted by eating Whispering Eggs, you control spiders and cave spiders; with the (somewhat useless) Mark of Slimes, granted by eating a Pulsating Core, you control slimes and magma cubes, with the Mark of Carnage, granted by eating Hissing Spores, you control creepers, and with the Mark of Flames, granted by eating a Soul Ember, you control blazes. Each type can be summoned using their respective essences. 
• Mobs under the control of a mark will not attack you, but will still be hostile to other players. They'll prioritize attacking anything that you're attacking, or anything that's attacked you. A swirling icon indicates that you've successfully hoodwinked a monster.
• ...However, keep in mind that each mark can also bestow some... adverse side effects, based on the mob type.
• You can further control your newfound army using a Cursed Whistle, which causes all nearby creatures to follow you when blown. (Ideally, a welcome help for endless hours of annoying mob-rangling.) I think it's safe to say I've outdone Minecraft Legends for the whole RTS thing.

And last but not least... this guy. Yeah, he's got some interesting tastes, and they apparently don't involve wearing pants. The jester's missions are completely, and I mean completely randomized, and especially at higher difficulties, can get really absurd. If you want to shake things up a bit and try your luck, this is the guy.

• In exchange for medallions the Jester offers two peculiar items. The first of which, Missing Pages, can be used to upgrade your bounties to the next level... at a price. Feed them to the odd statue hidden in each lodge, and your next bounty will increase the rewards of your next bounty... but will add an additional fail condition that has to be avoided, ranging from custom-cursed armor, to pursuing vexes, darkness, increased deadlines, and one particularly clever condition involving a pig. This is the only way to obtain a Cursed Medallion, by upgrading an expert-level mission beyond the usual limit.
• These conditions come along with a couple new curses, which you may be forced to deal with should you accept the statue's challenge. Curse of Shambling can be applied to boots, and causes you to constantly try to walk forwards. Curse of Lockstep can be applied to leggings, and forces you to be constantly sprinting. Curse of Frolicking is also applied to leggings, adding some entertaining randomization to your jumps. Curse of Brambles can be applied to any armor, and, simply, put, behaves like the Thorns enchantment, but in reverse. Lastly, the creatively named Curse of Whispering can be applied to helmets, and does exactly what the name implies.

• And finally, the Jester offers Playing Cards, special consumables that allow the wielder to perform one-off magical spells. Playing cards are dealt at random, with common ranked cards, and rarer special cards. All of them consume experience to use, or health if the player's XP is depleted.
• Ardor Cards grant regeneration and absorption; each rank grants more powerful levels at the cost of higher experience. The ace randomly grants maxed absorbtion, or none at all.
• Wrath Cards damage and repel all nearby entities; each rank grants more powerful repulsion at the cost of higher experience. The ace randomly deals incredible damage, or damages the wielder instead.
• Will Cards grant a burst of speed, resistance, and strength; each rank grants a more powerful and longer lasting effect. The ace randomly grants the highest level, or slows and weakens the wielder instead.
• And Bounty Cards simply grant a random assortment of rare minerals when triggered, with each rank granting a greater haul of loot. The ace randomly grants the highest amount, or a pile of coal instead.

Rare cards are a bit trickier to obtain, but tend to have some more interesting effects:

• The Sun sets the time to day, and creates a powerful explosion of divine lightning, igniting everything nearby.
• The Moon sets the time to midnight, lowers the wielder's gravity, and causes everything nearby to levitate.
• The World warps the player immediately back to world spawn, regardless of their dimension or location.
• The Tower generates a temporary, giant pillar of ghostly blocks that launches everything nearby into the air with incredible force. Up to you to find a way down.
• The Road generates a temporary, shining path of ghostly blocks in the direction the wielder is facing, and grants them a powerful burst of speed.
• The Doorway briefly allows the player to walk through walls, temporarily phasing out any solid blocks in their path.
• The Rift creates a blast of ghostly power, temporarily phasing out a large area of blocks, before consuming everything within. 
• Illusion grants the player speed and invisibility, and creates a ghostly duplicate that flees anything nearby, and runs off with their armor, distracting any nearby monsters. Their items return to them when the duplicate perishes.
• And lastly, Death inflicts darkness, slowness, and freezing on everything nearby, including the wielder. It then summons a warden directly behind them. The name says it all, really. 

If you'd like to test this early version of the mod, here's a couple of handy config tips to keep in mind:

• You can use /setRank and /setNotoriety to set your current bounty rank, and your current number of bounties completed in said rank. If you wanna try out the harder level bounties without doing a ton of easy tasks, use /setrank to put yourself at a higher level.
• Bounty Hunter trades are global, meaning that if you're playing multiplayer, one player trading might mean you have to wait for the hunters to restock. You can use the /resetHunters command to prematurely reset hunter trades. (By default, they restock at nightfall.) If you've got a larger number of players, first of all you shouldn't be running a beta version of something on a server, but secondly you should probably reset this regularly. You may also want to disable /gamerule doGlobalSpells, to disable the global effects of spells such as the Sun, Moon, and Storm. If you're worried about not having enough lodges, /resetLodges will allow an additional reset the checks for each lodge's generation, allowing additional duplicates to generate.
• By default, bounty completion is announced to all players. You can toggle /gamerule ChatBounties to only announce completion messages to the player who completed the bounty.
• I am aware that in the current version, requested enchanted books from Archivist missions do not properly check for matching enchantment data, and accept any book as an input. This is because book enchantments apparently use a different tag than regular enchantments, and I couldn't find a means of comparing arraylist tags before the submission deadline. I intend to fix this eventually, (I'm sure a method exists), and I'd appreciate suggestions.
• I wasn't kidding when I said there was a unique texture for every chiseled block; the process is managed using blockstates, and there either isn't a means of doing arbitrary block overlays, or I couldn't find one. This was made even more excruciating for the patterns with multiple sides, and by the fact that I wound up making additional textures for StayTrue compatibility, as they've got different palletes for nether bricks and sandstone. Long story short, the chiseled stuff took up at least a third of development, at which point it occured to me I maybe ought to start on the actual bounty system.
• The books, (on the offchance anyone's curious), are written using a procedure that references an extremely complicated localization key that then undergoes multiple text replacements based on the currently selected bounty, and is then reformatted and plugged into a setloot command that places it in the bounty box. At this point I never want to touch book NBT data again, and only came up with a way to make a system to do this for any arbitrary bounty after accidentally deleting the entirety of the original system three days before submission. It more-or-less works, enough said.
• And the ghostblocks, (which I'm still rather proud of), wound up being sort of a clever workaround. They conserve NBT data by transferring block properties into NBT tags, then reapplying those tags as block properties when the block's lifetime expires; and are able to convert storage blocks by initially storing the block's contents in the ghost block, and then converting those contents into an arraylist and applying them to the resulting block once it reverts. That being said they were also designed literally two days before submission, so anyone's bet if they work consistently. X)