Hextale

Added

• Buckets of Essence (#8): an empty bucket fills with 1000 mB of one pure essence from a Big Essence Jar or another mod's tank, and pours it back into them; storage mods keep them as items. They never pour out into the world.

• The Researcher's Diary has a search (#8): type over the map or click the field in its corner, and the steps you can see whose name holds the words are ringed and the map flies to the first; Enter goes to the next, Escape clears.

• The Researcher's Diary links its pictures: click an item in a recipe or scheme to open the step that makes it (the back arrow returns to the step you came from). With JEI, JEI's own show recipe / show uses keys work on those items too.

• The Chem Still shows the Crystal Pods it holds, lying on its base behind the receiver.

• JEI shows what the Chem Vat tempers: the metals, the vials of acid and shimmer its bath must hold, and the result.

• Chem-steel tools and armour are 3D models, with glass in the colour of the fuel in the tank you wear (dark when it is empty; shimmer glows). The armour: riveted plates over dark leather, copper hoses, a respirator with glass filters.

• While you wear a Chem Tank, a small glass gauge beside the hotbar shows its fuel in the fuel's colour.

• Chem-Steel Tank Chestplate (its own Lab Bench research): a chem-steel chestplate with the tank built into its back, so armour and fuel take one slot. It fills, pumps and feeds the gear like a Chem Tank.

• Chem-steel armour (one Lab Bench research for the whole set): helmet, chestplate, leggings and boots that never break and take no runes. Like the tools they run on the Chem Tank: refined shimmer gives the riftforged Bulwark's protection, ember oil the refined one's; with an empty tank they guard little better than leather. Every blow they take burns a little fuel.

• Chem-steel tools (late chemtech, one Lab Bench research for all four): pickaxe, axe, shovel and sword that never break and take no runes. They run on the Chem Tank on your back: refined shimmer gives the full strength of the riftforged tools, raw shimmer that of the radiant ones, ember oil that of the refined ones; with an empty tank they dig slower than stone tools and hit barely harder than a fist. Their tooltip shows what they give with the fuel you wear, their bar the tank's fuel; every block and every hit spends a little of it. The sword never breaks blocks, so a missed swing cannot dig.

• Chem Tank (late chemtech, worked out at the Lab Bench, made of chem-steel): a glass fuel tank in leather straps worn on the back - in the chest slot, or in the back slot when Curios is installed. It holds one fuel at a time (ember oil, raw or refined shimmer), shown through its glass on the wearer's back and as the bar of the item; fuel vials clicked onto it in the inventory pour in. Set down, it is filled with vials by hand or hopper, and an empty hand on it pumps its fuel into the tank you wear. It keeps its fuel when broken. Chemtech tools and armour that run on it come next.

• Chem Vat (late chemtech, worked out at the Lab Bench): a 3x3x3 tank of rusted plating over a Chem Burner, with Chem Glass in three sides, a Rusted Grate on top and the new Chem Vat Valve in front, sealed with a vial of acid. Pour acid and refined shimmer into its bath, give its fire vials of combustible mix or ember oil, and drop in metal - by hand, by hopper or thrown on the grate. It tempers two iron ingots and a netherite scrap into a Chem-Steel Ingot; the bath shows through the glass, green with acid and violet with shimmer.

• Chem-steel decor: Block of Chem-Steel, Chem-Steel Plating with stairs and slab.

• Ember Oil (worked out at the Lab Bench): Ember Wheat boiled in the Crucible with magma and sap essence gives four vials of a thick amber fuel that burns half as long again as the combustible mix in a Chem Burner or a furnace.

• Shimmer Bulbs brew raw shimmer: a bulb in the Crucible with sap and light essence gives six vials, twice what a Regenerative Slime gives, so a bulb field becomes the real source of shimmer.

• Spawn eggs for the creatures of the Void: Void Mite, Voidling, Rib Crawler, Pit Maw and Seer (creative tab and the vanilla Spawn Eggs tab).

• Wisps can now be made: a torch thrown into the boiling Crucible with a little light and spark essence rises as two Wisps. Set one down by hand and it floats there as a lasting little flame; a touch puts it out at once with a soft puff of sparks in its colour and gives it back.

• Wisps come in the hextech blue and all sixteen dye colours: mix any Wisp with a dye at the crafting table (hextech dust turns it blue again).

• The creative tab has a concentrate of every one of the 22 essences, not only of the primals.

• Modpacks and other mods can set the essences of any item, HexTale's own included, in the data map hextale:essences; everything crafted from it follows. How: the modpack guide (docs/modpack.md, "Essences of items").

• The chemtech garden begins. A vial of growth tonic or raw shimmer, or a bottle of sap, poured on farmland soaks the 3x3 around it into Steeped Soil: it never dries out or gets trampled, crops grow on it as on wet farmland, and while its doses last a crop on it often grows a stage more and a ripe harvest sometimes comes twice (shimmer strongest, sap weakest). Growth tonic splashed over farmland steeps it too.

• Chem Planter (worked out at the Lab Bench): an iron box with green glass sides and soil on top; its tank of growth tonic, raw shimmer or piped sap shows through the glass. It grows the plant on it by itself, a stage every five seconds for a dose, day or night, and its dose sometimes doubles a ripe harvest. Runes: Growth (feeds sooner), Fertility (a ripe harvest twice), Pollen (a neighbour grows too), Dam.

• Essence Sprinkler (worked out at the Lab Bench): a copper riser with a turning head; water and sap come by pipe, brews are poured in, and every few seconds it wets the dry farmland around it and tops up the beds and planters that run low on doses, so it spends only what the plants used. Runes: Shift, Dam, Fertility, Healing.

• Sap Tap: a copper spout set on the trunk of a living tree drips sap essence into a jar or pipe under it, or gathers it for a glass bottle; faster from a magic tree or a jungle trunk. Runes: Haste, Spring, Photosynthesis.

• Garden Trellis: a rusted iron lattice to climb like a ladder.

• Strains, each worked out at the Lab Bench and then made in the Crucible: a plain plant dropped into the boiling Crucible with the right essences comes out changed - wheat seeds with magma into Ember Wheat seeds, melon seeds with sap into Sap Gourd seeds, sugar cane with crystal into Crystal Cane, glow berries with rift into Shimmer Bulbs.

• The first strains: Cultivated Shimmerbloom (a bulb that opens into a shimmerbloom: shimmer from a garden bed), Ember Wheat (smouldering grain that burns in a furnace), the Sap Gourd (a melon-like gourd full of sap) and Crystal Cane (glassy cane that grows crystal pods to pick).

• Transmutation, worked out at the Lab Bench right after it is built: the Crucible turns an item into a kindred one for a little essence from its water, and every change also works backwards. Sand and red sand, sandstone and red sandstone, red and brown mushrooms and their blocks, seven pairs of flowers and tall flowers, carrots and potatoes, beetroots and sweet berries, dirt and podzol, cod and salmon, beef and porkchops, four pairs of logs, vines and glow lichen, kelp and seagrass.

• Advanced Transmutation (Lab Bench, after the Chem Burner): rarer things change for more essence. Redstone and glowstone dust, nether quartz and amethyst shards, ink sacs and glow ink sacs, slime balls and magma cream, soul sand and soul soil, the crimson and warped fungi, nylium, roots, stems and vines, basalt and blackstone, prismarine shards and crystals, obsidian and crying obsidian, blaze rods and breeze rods.

• A transmutation never gives more essence than went into it: each one costs what the new item carries more than the old one, plus a small fee. JEI lists every pair under the Crucible.

• The diary steps of both transmutations show every pair: pick an item in their rows to see its change there and back. No item that starts two Crucible recipes or brews asks for the same essence in both, so the water decides clearly what it becomes.

Changed

• JEI shows how a researched thing is made - its recipe, its multiblock and its info page - only once you have researched it; the item itself stays in the list. Lab Bench experiments stay visible.
• The Chem Still needs a Crystal Pod (grown on Crystal Cane) for every vial of refined shimmer it makes: drop pods in by hand or by hopper from the top or the sides.
• Hextech tools and armour are much stronger, each level a clear step: runed tools now beat diamond, refined ones beat netherite, radiant ones go well past it, and the riftforged tools mine stone in an instant with Efficiency V and fell ordinary creatures in one blow with Sharpness V (pickaxe speed 8.5 / 11 / 14 / 20, sword 7.5 / 9 / 10.5 / 14). Bulwark armour climbs to 30 armour points and toughness 5 a piece at level 4. Hexsteel tools and armour wear a little longer than diamond ones.
• Every level of tools and armour can be retuned in config/hextale-startup.toml (speed, damage, durability, protection, toughness); it is read at start-up and must match on the server and the clients.
• Devices talk less. Lines above the hotbar that only repeated what you see and hear are gone: "holds no more", "valve open", "sticker set", "linked", "the plate is aimed" and the like, status lines on an empty-hand click where the Researcher's Goggles show the same, and the altar's hint on an empty click. Lines that tell you why something did not work, or a number you cannot see elsewhere, stay.
• Every description in the mod was rewritten to be clear, in English and Russian. Rune descriptions, tooltips, hints and JEI pages now say plainly what a thing does and how to use it; the Researcher's Diary keeps its voice but says what each step is about and what to do next. Several texts that disagreed with how things actually work were corrected along the way.
• Descriptions are about half as long (English and Russian). Diary steps, JEI pages, hints and tooltips say what a thing does and what is not obvious, and no longer repeat recipes, amounts and costs that JEI or the screens already show. One word for each thing: the Void's mark on the land is "sickness" everywhere, chemtech brews come in vials, and the Arc Spire's Thrift rune names Lightning Essence.
• The diary draws its recipes as what happens instead of "this plus that". A Crucible step shows the pot over its fire, the essences its water must hold (sign, name and mB), what is thrown in and what rises; a brew also names the heat it needs and the bottles that scoop its doses. Dust on a block, the lapidary, the still, the tank and the Awakened Furnace's alloys show the inputs flowing into the device, drawn large, and the result coming out.
• JEI shows them the same way: the Crucible and Crucible Brewing pages draw the pot with its essences, the catalyst falling in, the fire and the heat it needs; hextech working, the still, the tank, the drain valve, rune writing and the Lab Bench show their inputs flowing into the device instead of plus signs.
• Labels that only repeated an icon are gone: the Crucible's "any fire" and the Chem Burner's heat (the icon says it, a cooler brew only adds "or hotter"), the catalyst's and the bottle's captions, the diary's notes under the furnace, the workbench, the bush, the alembic and the tank, the Lab Bench's Seal label, JEI's "Hexcore only" and "charge", the research's "Goals" word; the words stay in the tooltips.
• The Researcher's Diary map is tidier: the riftmetal tools, the Hexcore's steps and the deep side of the Void sit closer to where they come from, the pylons and farm devices have room around them, and the chemtech garden fans out under its soil instead of trailing far below.
• A step's shape on the diary map always says what it asks for: a hexagon means it must be researched first, also for a workstation (the Chem Burner, Chem Still, Axolotl Tank, Lapidary and Rune Circle now show their hexagon inside the cog ring), and only devices where further steps are made wear the cog ring (the Disintegrator and the Foundry no longer do, the Separator and the Rune Circle now do). The Lab Bench, where all chemtech starts, gets a great frame like the Research Table.
• The Russian name of the Nursery step no longer repeats the Incubator's.
• Bottles of essence stack up to 16 when they hold the same liquid (a separator pours a stack one whole bottle at a time).
• Every item of the mod carries the essences it is made of instead of a guess: wisps are pure light, devices carry what they work with (the alembic steam, the arc spire lightning), metals, crystals, gear, plants and the Void's things were all gone through; magic wood and magic stone now carry magic. The essence items carry their own essence.
• A few vanilla items got sensible essences too: sulfur, cinnabar, resin, the creaking heart, ferns, bushes, petals and roots.
• The Crucible is a heavier cast-iron cauldron with a new model and texture.
• Wisps the Eternal Flame rune leaves in tunnels still drop nothing, and they still give way to any block put there; Wisps set down by hand keep their spot.
• Wisps are drawn as round flames that look whole from every side, with twisting tongues, instead of a flat picture.
• Wisps can be aimed at and put out with anything in hand; only a pickaxe with the Eternal Flame rune looks past them, so digging on never puts out the light it leaves.
• The Crucible is kinder to the hands. Things go in by hand only when aimed into the pot; aimed at its outside, a torch or a block is placed as against any block. It never takes tools, armour, named or enchanted things, filled shulker boxes and bundles, jars or vials: thrown in, they bob back out with a soft gloop. An empty glass bottle is no longer swallowed when there is no brew to bottle.
• Finished results no longer fly off in all directions: they float on the water until fished out with an empty hand, or drift over the lip into a hopper, chest or pipe on the Crucible's front side.
• Boiling the Crucible away takes two sneak-uses: the first makes it hiss and says what would be lost. Results still soaking or floating are thrown out instead of vanishing, whichever way the pot is emptied.
• Essence that leaves the Crucible always wears the land: boiled away, spilt over the rim or lost with the broken pot, like essence poured out of a bucket.
• A bucket or bottle of water that would push essence over the rim is refused.
• Jade and the researcher's goggles tell what the item in hand would do in the Crucible before it is lost: what it turns into, which brew it starts, what it dissolves into, or why not (more heat, research, another brew, full doses). The water also stirs towards a player holding something it can take.
• The Crucible's status names the heat under it, and a comparator reads it (fill level, or the doses of a brew).
• Hoppers and pipes feeding the Crucible now work for the researcher who woke it or last used it by hand, so brews and researched transmutations start from them too; a catalyst for full doses stays in the hopper.
• A Chem Burner under a Crucible that has been boiling idle for half a minute burns its fuel four times slower.

Removed

• The "ideas in the margins" (WIP steps) are gone from the diary for good, and with them the client option showWipSteps: the map shows only what is really in the game.

Fixed

• Claimed chunks (FTB Chunks and other claim mods) get blighted like any other land (#9): the blight is a force of nature. Servers that want claims to keep it out can turn on blightRespectsClaims.
• The Foundry no longer reads "Waking up" while it stands idle: with fuel or fire but nothing to melt it says it heats only while something melts inside and marks its input grid. Its warnings now show on the screen as soon as they happen.
• The diary pictures say what really happens: Rusted Plating shows a vial of acid thrown at an iron block (not a fermented spider eye and an empty vial), Refined Shimmer shows vials of raw shimmer going into the Chem Still, the Hextech Crystal and Gemstone show the Lapidary with its disc, a Void Crystal is mined from its cluster, and Void Carapace says it is made in the Crucible.
• JEI has a "Thrown Vial" page: acid rusts iron blocks into Rusted Plating and ages copper, coolant sets lava into obsidian and magma into netherrack.
• A Crucible or a workbench that refuses something worked out at the Lab Bench now says to research it at the Lab Bench, not at the Research Table.
• Leaving the game in the middle of a passage through a breach or a gate no longer sinks the player into the ground (or below the world) on the next visit, and the passage no longer carries the player a dozen blocks off the spot they arrive at while its screen is still up.