Faint Souls

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Faint Souls is a Forge mod for Minecraft 1.16.5 and 1.20.1 that reshapes survival around recovery, progression, and risk management. Death matters, healing is limited, and moving farther from spawn gradually makes the world more dangerous and more rewarding.

Core Loop

Kill enemies to collect souls.
Spend souls on character stats.
Rest at campfires to heal, refill Estus, and bind your respawn.
On death, recover your dropped souls from a grave before you lose them for good.

Main Mechanics

Souls and Death

Most hostile mobs award souls.
Soul rewards are configurable and can scale upward with local world difficulty.
When you die, your current souls are stored in a Soul Grave placed near your death location.
Sneak into the grave, or break it yourself, to reclaim what you lost.
If you die again before recovering an older grave, outstanding graves are reduced. Repeated deaths are intentionally punishing.

Character Progression

Press L to open the level-up screen.
Spend souls to increase:
- Vitality - increases max health
- Strength - increases attack damage
- Endurance - increases attack speed
Level costs scale upward and can be overridden in config.

Campfires and Resting

Interact with a lit campfire with an empty main hand to rest.
Resting does all of the following:
- fully heals the player
- sets the current respawn point
- refills Estus charges
- triggers nearby enemy respawns in loaded chunks
- briefly locks movement during the rest animation window
Surface campfires are placed procedurally but less frequently than cave campfires.

Estus and Healing Rules

Press R to consume an Estus charge.
Estus healing scales with flask level.
Natural regeneration is disabled.
Hunger is effectively neutralized as a healing mechanic, so recovery is centered around Estus and campfires instead of vanilla food-based sustain.

World Difficulty

Difficulty rises with distance from world spawn and is tracked per chunk/biome region.
Harder areas produce stronger enemies and better soul payouts.
Press M to open the difficulty map overlay.

Enemy Respawn System

The mod stores custom respawn points for enemies in explored areas.
Resting at campfires repopulates nearby loaded chunks from those saved spawn points.
This keeps the world from feeling permanently cleared while still tying respawns to the resting loop.

Wither Soul

The Wither drops a Wither Soul.
Consuming it grants permanent flight.
The effect persists through death and relogging.

Controls

L - open the level-up screen
M - open the difficulty map
R - use Estus

Commands

/setsouls <player> <amount> - set a player's soul count

Configuration

The mod writes config-style data files under config/soulsmod/.

Important files include:

level_costs.cfg - soul cost per level
soul_values.cfg - soul rewards for mob types
spawn_weights.cfg - weighted spawn choices used by custom spawn placement logic

These files are safe to tweak between runs if you want a harsher or more generous progression curve.