EssentialCraft 5 Unofficial

EssentialCraft 5 Unofficial is a port of EssentialCraft 4 Unofficial to Minecraft 1.20.1 Forge. It is a magic mod built around one form of energy, MRU (Magical Radiation Units): machines gather it, Bound Gems carry it through the air, crystals and batteries store it, and it powers machines, tools, armor and rituals. MRU is never quite safe, though. Machines leak it as they work, and the clusters the leaks form slowly corrupt anyone who stays too close.

Everything from the original is ported, except what was removed on purpose (listed in the in-game appendix). New chapters, monsters and bosses carry the game past where the original stopped, and the research book has been rewritten from scratch as a step-by-step guide.

Versions

DummyCore and Baubles are no longer needed. JEI and Botania are optional (see the FAQ).

The Research Book

Every player gets the Research Book the first time they join a world, and every page in it is readable from the start. A main line of 23 chapters takes you from your first elemental drops to the final boss, one step at a time. Steps are ticked off as you complete them, and the home page always shows your next one. Side chapters on gear, guns, baubles, farming, ore processing and more can be built whenever your progress allows.

• Hold Ctrl over an item's tooltip to open the page about it.
• Start typing on the home page to search, even for names from the original.
• The book is available in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

The Research Book: the main line, side chapters and your next step

How MRU works

• Making it: at first you trade your own matrix for it. Kill creatures to collect UBMRU, then turn it into MRU in a Matrix Destructor. Generators come next: burning fuel, burning plants, drawing on the cold, catching the midday sun, and the Moon Well, which works at night and runs best deep underground.
• Moving it: there are no pipes or wires. A Bound Gem in a machine pulls MRU through the air from a source up to 16 blocks away.
• Storing it: carry Soul Storage items as batteries, or bank hundreds of thousands of MRU in a multiblock Enrichment Chamber.
• Balance: every bit of MRU has a Balance between 0 and 2: frozen below 1, pure at exactly 1, chaos above. Most machines ignore it, but some recipes only run within a set range, so you learn to blend sources with an MRU Intersector.
• Corruption: machines leak MRU into floating clusters called MRUCUs. Once a cluster reaches 10,000 MRU it deals matrix damage to everyone within 12 blocks, and enough of that turns into lasting corruption effects that only a Soul Pentacle can cure. Move clusters away, wall them off with plating, or wear MHS armor.

An early base: Magician Table, Radiating Chamber and generators linked by Bound Gems

The main line

Every few chapters you also break through to a new matrix rank. On a first playthrough, the whole main line takes a little over a hundred hours.

Hoanna

Hoanna is the world MRU burned: a dimension of its own under a dark sky, with three suns by day and two moons and an MRU aurora by night. To get there, earn the wind's true name on a Wind Tablet and use it to turn a Nether portal into a Gate to Hoanna.

Its seven kinds of land run from the Frozen, Magic and Chaos Corrupted Lands to the Dreadlands, the Hoanna Desert and the Hoanna Sea. Destroyed towns, old catacombs and modern shafts hold the Titanite and void materials the late game is built on. Radiation builds up the longer you stay, and calamities strike every so often: a sun array that burns anyone under open sky, poison fumes, days of darkness and earthquakes.

Hoanna at night: a destroyed town under two moons and the MRU aurora

Beyond the original

• Matrix ranks: your MRU matrix now has nine ranks. Fill your Matrix Codex by killing different kinds of hostile mobs yourself, gather the offerings and energy, then win a trial at the Matrix Crucible against Matrix Echoes that wear your own face. Each rank unlocks something new, such as storing MRU inside yourself or siphoning it from MRUCUs.
• Ley Projector and Ley Condenser: the projector takes the place of the Magical Quarry. It digs nothing and slowly projects the ores of the dimension's rock inside the machine. Later you can upgrade it into a Ley Condenser that makes the vanilla mineral you pick, or Nether Stars with ESPE.
• The Inquisitorium: the original only mentioned it as a rumor. Decode the Glitchy Core the Holographic Projection drops, follow the coordinates into Hoanna's Shadow Corrupted Land and light a beacon to summon the Inquisitorium Sentinel.
• Computer Terminal and modules: fit the four pieces of the Computer Guy's Suit with modules such as Rewind, Phase Anchor and Attraction, and switch them on and off in the Computer Terminal.
• Demonic Renown: the more trades you complete with demons, the better their terms: a second price to choose from, extra experience, a reroll, and finally a Demon's Oath.
• Attunement: armor and weapons earn attunement as you fight with them and are raised stage by stage at the Magician Table. A fully attuned Ember Elemental Sword can be reforged into the Verdict Blade.
• Two final chapters: Shade Cores, a tier 4 Soul Pentacle, and the Heart of Calamity, a final boss summoned with a Calamity Beacon. The Calamity Remnant it leaves takes you to matrix rank 9.
• More of Hoanna: eight native monsters, the mana tide and ley storms, survey maps, camps and nests out in the wilds, sealed vaults, sunken districts whose altars call up the Abyssal Tidelord, Inquisitorium outposts, and a Ruin Watcher guarding every town.
• 13 new monsters and 6 new bosses across the Overworld, the Nether, the End and Hoanna, with a Bestiary chapter on where to find them, how to fight them and what they drop.
• New tools and machines, including the Magical Cultivator, Elemental Decomposer, Ley Detector, Essential Pickaxe and Axe, Homeward Compass, Force Dome, Matrix Tuner and MRU Converter.
• Fragments of Essence: seven volumes of lore left in ancient ruins, in Hoanna and on the Inquisitorium Sentinel.

A matrix rank trial: your own Matrix Echoes at the Matrix Crucible

The Ley Projector turns MRU into ore without touching the ground

The Computer Terminal, where the suit's modules are switched on and off

The Heart of Calamity and its four pillars

Changes from EssentialCraft 4 Unofficial

The full list, including where every renamed item went, is in the Research Book under Appendix · Changes from EC4. The main points:

• Rewritten for 1.20.1 Forge. DummyCore is no longer needed. Baubles are worn in Curios slots (two rings, a necklace and a belt), and only one of each kind takes effect.
• Machines never dig or place blocks in the world. The Magical Quarry, the activators, the block breakers and the Magical Replanter are gone; the Ley Projector produces ores inside the machine instead. Explosions from the mod never break blocks.
• No more mob-farm shortcuts. The Spawner Collector and its collected spawners, the Darkness Obelisk, the Monster Duplicator and the Monster Holding Device are removed, and mobs killed by coils, reactors and demons drop nothing.
• Large-scale world tools are removed: the Biome Wand, the Weather Controller and the MRU Chunk Loader, which rewrote biomes, changed the weather for the whole world and kept chunks loaded forever. The original had no survival recipe for the last two anyway.
• The Magical Inventory Manager network is removed, as it could duplicate or eat items. Magical chests, the Magical Hopper and item filters take over its job.
• Late-game armor is no longer invulnerable while charged. Void armor and the Computer Guy's Suit only block their share of damage while they can pay for it in MRU, and have real armor points and extra health instead.
• Corruption blocks and the Corruption Cleaner are not ported, since the original never switched corruption spreading on.
• Kills with MRU guns count as yours, so mobs drop their loot and experience as usual.
• Ancient ruins are far rarer in the Overworld, and newly generated ones are guarded by an MRU Golem.
• Many bugs of the original are fixed, including a few that players relied on: the Moon Well no longer runs at full rate above its height limit, one sun beam feeds one Sun Ray Absorber, Pale Gems no longer turn back into diamonds, and the Magical Crafter, Magical Display and Demonic Pentacle finally work. UBMRU from kills is based on the target's base max health.
• The original's integrations with other mods are gone (CraftTweaker, Blood Magic, Thaumcraft, Tinkers' Construct, Waila). JEI and Botania support is new.

FAQ

Do I need EssentialCraft 4 Unofficial, DummyCore or Baubles? No. Curios API is the only required dependency.

Is JEI required? No, every recipe is in the Research Book. With JEI installed, the mod's own machine recipes (Magician Table, Radiating Chamber, Mithriline Furnace, ore processing, wind imbuing, Magical Cultivator, Elemental Decomposer) and the cost of each Enchantment Amplifier and Enchantment Ascender level show up in JEI as well.

Can MRU power machines from other mods? Yes. The MRU Converter turns MRU into Forge Energy (FE), or into mana when Botania is installed.

Can I tune it for my modpack? Yes. Machine numbers and most features can be changed in essentialcraft5-server.toml in each world's serverconfig folder; put a copy in defaultconfigs to apply it to new worlds. The Research Book reads its numbers from the current settings, and pages about features you switch off are hidden.

Does it work in multiplayer? Yes. Install it on both the client and the server.

Can I put it in a modpack? Yes, no need to ask. Credit the authors and keep the license (see below).

Anything to know before updating? Back up your world first. The changelog of each version lists what changed.

I played the original. Where did my favorite machine go? Open Appendix · Changes from EC4 in the Research Book, or type the old name on its home page.

Source code · Issues

License and credits

• EssentialCraft 5 Unofficial is a derivative of EssentialCraft 4 Unofficial by TheLMiffy1111, with mrAppleXZ, InfinityStudio and other contributors, which is in turn a derivative of EssentialCraft 3 by Modbder. All three are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. EssentialCraft 5 Unofficial is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 by Roinflam.
• It also adapts DummyCore by Modbder and DummyCore Unofficial by TheLMiffy1111, under the same license.
• Original source code: EssentialCraft 3 · DummyCore · EssentialCraft 4 Unofficial · DummyCore Unofficial
• The code was rewritten for 1.20.1 Forge. Most textures, models, sounds and translations come from EssentialCraft 4 Unofficial. The assets that were changed are listed in CREDITS.md, which ships inside the jar.
• A few GUI backgrounds and recolored textures inherited from the original are based on Minecraft's own textures. Those parts belong to Mojang Studios and are not covered by CC BY-SA.
• Holographic Record and holographic projection boss music: "Ropocolypse 2" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.
• Music discs and sounds in the original that belong to third parties are not included.
• You may share and adapt this mod, including in modpacks, as long as you give credit and share your adaptations under the same license.
• This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Modbder or TheLMiffy1111.