Divine Encounters

Divine Encounters adds two boss fights Both are summoned rather than found, fought in an arena that builds itself around you, and designed around a specific mechanic rather than around large health bars.

Getting a fight

You start one by binding an Omen. There are two, and each summons a different boss.

The main way to get one is a shrine: place a lectern on top of a lodestone, put a signed book on the lectern, and interact with the lodestone. The shrine reads what you wrote. Words leaning toward triumph draw the Omen of War; words leaning toward spite draw the Omen of Malice. It won't answer a page of one word repeated, or a prayer that pulls in both directions at once. There's a thirty-minute cooldown per player between answers.

Omens can also arrive from certain kills: bosses for War, players or baby animals for Malice - at a low chance with its own cooldown. Both routes are configurable and can be switched off.

Once an omen is bound to you, it waits until you reach ground that suits it. War wants open country with room to make an arena; Malice wants dark forest. If the ground refuses, you're told why: wrong biome, too uneven, too close to somewhere that's already claimed. You get a short warning before an arena commits, so you can walk away. A binding lasts an hour and then fades.

The Visage of War

A hovering, armoured figure with a halberd, fought on open ground inside a cage that rises out of the earth.

It's a straightforward fight in the sense that it never hides and never leaves. Every attack winds up visibly, and once it commits it can't turn to follow you. The swing goes where it was already pointed. It has eight attacks, ranging from a quick thrust to an eleven-block forward cleave that does very heavy damage and is avoided by not standing in a narrow line.

What makes it distinctive is how it moves: it holds completely still, then crosses distance very quickly, then stops dead. At 60% health it changes pace; everything speeds up by about a quarter and the gaps between attacks shrink. The attacks themselves don't change.

The Visage of Malice

A horned figure that hovers rather than walks, fought in a dark forest inside a cage grown from the trees.

Its mechanic is visibility. While you are looking at it, it behaves normally. While nobody is genuinely looking, it stops having a position at all: it isn't moving somewhere else, it's nowhere until something makes it real again. Your job is to keep it on screen; its job is to get out of your view.

It can't hurt you or be hurt while it's in that state, and it can't appear and attack without warning. The sequence is fixed: it picks a place, you get a directional sound and light cue from that direction, then it appears, then the attack winds up, then it can hurt you. It also can't vanish immediately after arriving. Every appearance lasts long enough for you to answer it, and it returns on its own if you lose it completely.

It has ten attacks, four of which only work from a position you've lost track of. Three phases narrow how much of your vision counts as looking. Early on almost anywhere on screen holds it, later only near-direct attention. At 40% health it runs a one-time sequence where it spends most of its time unresolved and returns repeatedly from different angles; landing a hit during it forces it to stay visible for a moment.

Two other things: you'll see brief false silhouettes at the cage's edge, which can't touch you and never attack: the real one always announces itself with a stronger cue. And leaves don't hide it, slow it, or block your view of it; tree trunks block your view but not always the boss itself.

More Details

• Both arenas assemble in stages and are removed afterwards, restoring the terrain.
• Three advancements, one of which tells you the shrine exists.
• A config file covering every attack's damage, both bosses' health, armour, knockback resistance and size, and all the omen settings. Changes need a game restart.
• Loot is currently vanilla materials.
• All sounds are currently built from vanilla sound events rather than original audio - will be changed in the future.

Current state

Playable and complete as a loop, but not finished. Balance hasn't been settled, although multiplayer has been tested and behavior is confirmed. Furthermore, rewards aren't substantial, and that's because the mod is intended to go with other mods in a modpack and have its rewards configured. The mod intentionally rewards nothing unique, although that is something I plan to change.