Craftics - Grid Based Tactical RPG

Party and allies

- Shift + Right Click a passive or neutral mob on your island with an empty hand to bring it into your battle party, click again to remove it, the action bar reports party status like "Active In Party (1/1)"

- Party capacity is 1 plus your Pet affinity level, and always-hostile mobs (zombies, skeletons, creepers, and friends) can never be recruited

- Spawn eggs are now rare loot drops, throw one at a tile in battle to summon that mob as an ally for 2 AP within 5 tiles, it fights alongside you for the current battle and counts toward your party cap

- Leads command pets, hold a lead to enter command mode, click an ally to select it, then click an adjacent enemy to order an attack or any walkable tile to order a move, each command costs 2 AP and does not use up the ally's own turn

- Bee allies inflict poison, any bee that lands a sting applies 3 turns of poison and takes recoil damage equal to a quarter of its max HP, mirroring vanilla bee behavior

- Jukebox buff, placing a jukebox in battle plays music across the arena and grants every ally +3 speed for the rest of that battle

Hybrid classes

- Two distinct armor materials worn in an exact 2/2 split form a hybrid class with its own name and combat effect, 15 vanilla material pairs are registered (leather and chainmail, leather and iron, and so on)

- Fixed hybrid classes triggering on a 3/1 (or 1/3) split, the detector now requires exactly two of each of two distinct materials across all four armor slots and rejects any other distribution

Movement and the Move item

- New custom Move item replaces the feather, a single-stack uncommon item shown as green "Move"

- The Move item is force-locked to a single hotbar slot during combat, MoveSlotManager re-seats it every tick and restocks it if it is dropped or moved

- New keybinds rotate the locked Move slot left or right so you can put it where you want without losing the lock

- Wind Charge works as a self-movement special, target an adjacent empty tile to launch yourself up to 2 tiles the opposite way and arm a 1.5x momentum bonus on your next attack, or target an enemy to deal 1 damage and knock it back up to 3 tiles

Combat items and weapons

- Rocket Crossbow AOE, loading a firework rocket in the off hand turns crossbow shots into a 3x3 explosive blast that deals half damage around the target, with Multishot it fires two extra rockets along the perpendicular diagonals, each with its own 3x3 blast

- Attack AOE preview, an on-grid preview now shows which tiles a weapon will hit (amber for damage, blue for effect-only) for maces, crossbows, swords, bows, and coral fans, driven by a shared AoeShapes geometry library covering slam, plus, sweeping edge, cone, ring, line, and pierce shapes

Status effect rework

- Wither now scales up as it wears off, base damage of (1 + level + Special affinity) is multiplied each turn by how far the curse has progressed toward its end, so the final ticks hit hardest, peak duration is tracked so re-applying does not reset the ramp

- Fire is now flat damage from the source for its whole duration, (1 + level + Special affinity) per turn, blocked entirely by Fire Resistance

- Poison damage is (2 x level) + remaining turns + Special affinity per turn, minimum 1

Battlefield obstacles

- Fire spreads to flammable obstacles, each turn a burning tile ignites flammable orthogonal neighbors for 3 turns, flammables include tall grass and fern, cactus, plus logs, planks, leaves, wool, wooden fences, saplings, flowers, carpets, hay, bookshelves, scaffolding, bamboo, dried kelp, target blocks, and cobwebs

- Any non-functional full-cube block can be placed on the ground in battle as a temporary wall for 4 turns, block-entity blocks (chests, furnaces, jukeboxes, and the like), half-blocks, tall or hinged blocks, and an explicit blocklist (TNT, slime, honey, magma, beacon, spawner, and more) are excluded

- Tall grass can now be broken from diagonal tiles too, breaking uses Chebyshev distance so all 8 surrounding tiles count as adjacent, costs 1 AP, and clears both halves

Stacked enemies

- New stacked enemy variants where a rider sits on a mount, killing the lower layer drops the upper layer to keep fighting

- Zombie Stack, an adult zombie carrying a baby zombie, kill the adult and the faster baby (speed 3) takes over

- Skeleton Horseman and Zombie Horseman, a skeleton or zombie riding its matching undead horse, the mount is the fast frontline and the rider drops as the final layer

- Piglin Cavalry, a piglin riding a hoglin, Nether only and the toughest stack at 18 HP on the mount

- Slime Tower, three slimes stacked into a tower whose attack scales with the layers left (8, then 6, then 4), the final slime still splits on death into mini slimes that deal only 1 damage each

- Blaze Tower, three immobile blazes stacked into a stationary turret that fires fireballs at range 3

Wither boss rework

- The Wither boss fight is rebuilt as a two-phase encounter at 65 HP, 8 ATK, 5 DEF, range 5, on a 2x2 footprint

- Phase 1, a barrage of 3 tougher skulls every 2 turns (6 HP, 7 damage, up to 6 active), a passive radius-3 decay aura dealing 2 damage a turn, summoning 2 wither skeletons every 4 turns (up to 4 alive), and a 4-tile charge when the player keeps distance

- Phase 2 below half HP, an enraging explosion deals 8 damage in a radius-3 burst, then skull volleys grow to 5 (up to 10 active), summons to 3 (up to 6 alive), the decay aura expands to radius 4, charges leave a decay trail, and the boss becomes immune to ranged attacks

UI and loot management

- Player hover stats, hovering a party player on the grid opens an inspect panel with HP bar, ATK, AC, SPD, AP, and active effects, tinted blue to set it apart from enemy and ally panels

- Toggle button for stats in the inventory, a stats panel on the right of the inventory screen shows level, unspent points, all six stats with base and spent breakdowns, emeralds, and the damage-type affinity panel, toggled on and off

- Respec affinities, a dedicated screen lets you allocate unspent affinity points for free or refund spent points at a cost of 1 XP level each, sent to the server as per-affinity deltas

- Full inventory loot management, the post-victory loot screen is now a chest-style GUI with your inventory below, a Take All button, and a Continue button that warns before leaving items behind

- Trinkets are no longer lost on death, accessories from the Accessories slots are saved alongside your inventory when a Recovery Compass triggers and restored on respawn

- F1 hides all combat UI, the combat HUD and tile overlays now respect the vanilla hud-hidden flag and skip rendering entirely

- More in-game hints covering newer features (moving without a feather, ending your turn, healing at low HP, first combat, and the hub level-select arrow)

- Fixed the Trial Chamber arena grid merging into itself, it now renders as a crisp, properly aligned grid like every other arena

Goat horn overhaul

- All 8 horn variants now actually work in combat (Admire, Yearn, and Call previously did nothing or fired only once with no duration tracking)

- Horns from any source work: goat-kill drops, raid loot, structure chests, trader trades, and /give all identify correctly via the vanilla INSTRUMENT data component instead of relying on a custom name

- Each horn plays its own instrument sound (Ponder plays Ponder, Yearn plays Yearn, etc.) — the previous code picked a random sound from the goat-horn list on every use

- Re-using a buff horn refreshes duration to max(remaining, fresh) instead of clobbering the existing effect

- Weakness debuff lifecycle: enemies hit by Admire now lose the -2 ATK after the listed turn count, ticked alongside the existing defense-penalty system

- Stale "Taunt all enemies" tooltip removed

- Pre-overhaul horns with the legacy custom-name tag continue to work (backward-compatible)

- Goat horns are now Special-class items: the player's Special affinity scales horn duration and amplifier the same way it scales potions

- Re-using a horn before its previous effect expires now stacks the amplifier (capped at MAX_HORN_AMPLIFIER) and refreshes duration — consecutive casts make the buff or debuff stronger, not shorter

- All four version shards (1.21.1, 1.21.3, 1.21.4, 1.21.5) compile and run; vanilla INSTRUMENT API drift in 1.21.5 isolated to a single helper class

Banner overhaul

- Banners now place a real, color-correct banner block on the target tile (previously the use was silent: no block, no visible AOE, no way to tell it had worked)

- Each turn, the +DEF aura is outlined by sparse happy-villager particles on every tile within manhattan distance 2 of any planted banner

- Allies inside the aura now actually get the banner DEF bonus — previously the placement message claimed they did, but only the player's damage path applied it

- New "Banner aura reduced damage by N%" message when incoming damage to the player is mitigated by a banner zone

- Banners are now Special-class items: the +2 DEF base scales with the player's Special affinity at placement time and is frozen into the tile-effect entry, so later affinity gains don't retroactively buff old banners

- Overlapping banners take the max DEF of the strongest single banner instead of stacking (no infinite +DEF from carpet-bombing)

- Banner color is preserved through the tile-effect lifecycle so all 16 vanilla colors stay visually distinct

- 16-banner enumeration is now explicit (BannerEffects helper) instead of `item.toString().contains("banner")` string sniffing

- Special-class scaling extracted into a SpecialAffinity helper used by potions, banners, and goat horns — one source of truth for the formula

- All four version shards compile and run