Campaign Core: Washed Ashore

Campaign Core: Washed Ashore is a framework for designing custom Act-based campaigns in modded Minecraft. It allows you to define encounters through JSON data files while also exposing hooks that can run custom Java code. This allows you to sequence what are essentially questlines one after another, guiding players through a completely custom campaign one quest at a time.

Campaign Core also includes the Settlers Module, a custom frontier hub system that allows players to receive quests tied to settlements throughout the world. These settlements simulate basic needs such as food requirements, surplus, and population, but that is not their greater purpose. They exist to give players quests to embark on and can sometimes call nearby players to complete quests in exchange for rewards. Main quests can also be tied to these settlements, giving players a reason to visit them in the first place.

Campaign Core features a visual POI marker system that allows players to track which quests and encounters they have completed, as well as those they have yet to finish. Quests and encounters can be tracked individually in this way. You can designate whether a quest marker appears immediately after the quest is obtained or remains hidden until later, as well as determine when the marker disappears automatically.

Washed Ashore is the bundled Act, consisting of roughly six encounters spread across a 5,000-block area. Initially, six encounters might seem sparse, but the purpose of the Act is to provide a backbone that incentivizes players to explore. The actual meat of the experience should come from the other mods included in a modpack. Ideally, these mods should provide detours, distractions, and disruptions as players trek through the main journey, creating a more fulfilling overall adventure. This experience is modeled after Bethesda-style open-world games, where players are often told to travel somewhere relatively far away but discover that there is much to do along the way if they have the eyes to see it.

Lastly, although it is intended to be used alongside other mods, Campaign Core does not require much to function on its own. Encounters will fall back to regular Minecraft mobs and bosses when necessary, but will favor bosses from my own mods, Sculk and Scavenge and ANARCHY RPG Minibosses, with occasional appearances from other mods such as Mebahel’s Draugrs when present. As a result, an encounter may not play out exactly the same way in another modpack with a different mod list.

NOTE: The texture pack featured in the above images is not official content, nor is it mine. It is the Excalibur texture pack by Maffhew, and is featured in my modpack Ruthless Frontiers, which heavily features this mod.