Glimmerflies

**Catch fireflies in jars. Give them a home. Then shrink down and step inside it.**

On clear nights, tiny lights drift through the forests and meadows. Catch a few in a jar, carry them home, and let them go into a glass terrarium. They'll live there the way bees live in a hive: out among your flowers at night, glowing softly, and back inside at dawn or when the rain starts. Build a glass room, fill it with flowers, and you've got a garden that lights itself.

But the terrarium is also a door.

Sneak-click it with empty hands and you shrink down and slip inside, into a small walled garden that belongs to that colony alone. It's always dusk in there. Look after the place and the fireflies will hang glowing cocoons from the trees, and the colony will grow.

## What's in the mod

- **Fireflies** in four colours, with a rare Blue to chase
- **Catching Jars** that show a little glowing dot for each firefly inside
- **Firefly Terrariums** that stand on a block or hang like a lantern, and light up as the colony grows
- **The Glimmer Garden**, a private 18 by 18 walled garden inside every terrarium
- **See-through glass**: tiny players walking around inside the jar, and giants looming past the garden's walls
- **Cocoons and breeding**, by themselves if you keep the garden nice, or right away with glow berries
- **Real light** from flying fireflies, not just a glow on the screen
- **A garden report** that tells you exactly what your colony needs next
- **Three advancements** to earn

## Inside the garden

Plant, dig, build a little house, put in a chest. Everything you'd do outside works in there, except for what would let you break out. The frosted walls can't be broken by anything, not even TNT or creative mode. Bring a friend too, since several players can share a garden.

While someone's inside, anyone standing by the terrarium can see them, a tiny figure with their own skin walking around on the moss. And if you're the one inside, look up: the friend waiting by the jar is now a giant shadow, looming past the frosted walls.

If you pick up the terrarium, the colony and the garden come with it. Place it somewhere new and everything's still there.

## Good to know

- **Install it on both the client and the server.** No other mods are needed.
- **Minecraft shows an "Experimental Settings" warning** when you first load a world with this mod. That happens with any mod that adds a dimension. Just click Proceed.
- **You need both hands empty** to step into a terrarium.
- **If you die in a garden,** you respawn as usual and your items wait for you inside.
- **Monsters won't spawn right next to a flying firefly,** because the light is real. You can turn this off with `fireflyLightLevel = 0`.

## For modpack makers

Glimmerflies uses its own namespace, doesn't change vanilla mobs or blocks, and has no required dependencies. Recipes use common tags, spawn biomes and hover plants are data-driven, and there's a config setting for nearly everything, including a master switch for the garden. It's also built to stay light: in testing, a hundred fireflies added at most a couple of milliseconds to a server tick, and an empty garden costs nothing at all.

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Requires Minecraft 1.20.1 and Forge 47.x.