Kaelo's Content 1.0.2

Nine new weapons, a pass over every old one so that no two do the same job, two status effects of the mod's own, and six armour and combat fixes.

New weapons

The Champion's Trials ladder — five blades in a chain that branches:

Elder Relic ─┬─ Dawnvow ── Sunflare
             └─ Deepvow ── Oathwarden

The dormant relic does nothing at all, which is the point of it. The warm branch marks and then tears into what it marked; the cold branch bites deeper into anything already frozen and drinks health back.

Two fast blades. Voidwhisper (16) and Bloodletter (17) swing roughly twice as often as anything else and give up half a block of reach for it. One bites for far more when you strike from behind or unseen — decided by where you are standing, not by a dice roll. The other deepens a Bleeding wound up to four times over, and its right-click tears every wound within seven blocks open at once.

Tidespear (30) — three and a half blocks of reach, the only weapon here that outranges a sword. It runs through whatever is lined up behind what you hit. No button; the reach is the point.

Astralrend (32) — right-click tears everything within eight blocks off the ground, holds it there for three seconds, and throws it back down onto the spot it left, harder the higher it went.

No two weapons do the same job

Most riders here used to be one idea in eleven costumes: hang a vanilla debuff on the target for a few seconds. Every weapon was checked against every other, and each now does a different KIND of thing.

• Kaelo's Blade (44) — right-click and six blades tear loose, stand in a wall behind your shoulders, and hunt on their own for half a minute, one at a time, each picking its own target. And it remembers: every kill makes that particular sword permanently heavier, up to ten points. It had no on-hit effect at all before this — a coloured trail was the whole of it.
• Oathwarden (42, two-handed) — carry it without drawing it and its blade flies out on its own, follows you, and runs down whatever you strike or whatever strikes you. It spends itself doing so and has to rest.
• Abyssal Shard (38) — executes: below a quarter health it stops wounding and starts finishing, scaling with how far past the line the target is. Right-click and the blade comes apart behind you — six splinters, three high and three low — and converges on what you are looking at. They pierce.
• Valthera Legacy (36) — reads your armour. Worn with the full Valthera Legacy set its light goes from three points to nine. The mod's nine armour sets and nineteen blades had no idea the others existed until now.
• Skysplitter (33) — one swing in four calls a real bolt of lightning, and every swing does while the blade is charged.
• Sunflare (32) — right-click plants a pillar of daylight where you aimed. It stays there, and whatever walks through it carries the burning out.
• Voidreaver (31) — steals: takes the best blessing off its target and puts it on you.
• Nightfall (30) — chains. The dark jumps to the next thing standing near and blinds that too: the only weapon that touches something it was not swung at.
• Stormward (28) — no button at all. While it is in hand a third of every blow comes back at whoever landed it, capped, and it will not reflect a reflection.
• Winterfang (28) — a kill settles snow on the ground, skins standing water over with ice, and freezes everything still alive nearby, which is exactly what Deepvow is built to punish.
• Aurelia hits harder the worse you are doing. Lumina is the only weapon whose button repairs you instead of hurting something else.

Five blades have no right-click at all — Stormward, the Elder Relic, Deepvow and the Tidespear among them. A weapon does not need a button to have an identity, and a button pressed out of habit is not one.

Landing hits shortens the wait on your own blade's ability, and using it spends what you banked. Blades without a button do not count hits at all.

Two status effects of the mod's own

• Bleeding — damage over time whose amplifier IS the stack count, so Bloodletter has something to spend. Reusing Wither would have had two weapons silently overwriting each other's work, and would have told the player they were being withered, which is a lie about what is happening.
• Sunfire — what Sunflare's pillar leaves on whatever stood in it. Burns, double against the undead, and carried out of the pillar by whatever walks through it. Fire-immune mobs take it as damage instead.

Fixed

• Skysplitter never called lightning on a hit, and then struck the wrong place. The rider was written, documented and wired to nothing — the sword was registered with the anti-undead one instead. And a bolt only damages what is inside it on its first tick, by which time the target has taken its knockback, so anything light enough to be thrown was missed. It now strikes on one swing in four and cannot miss.
• Clearance was fattening small armour cubes instead of moving them. Growing a cube by 0.7 in every direction is nothing to an 8×8×8 helmet shell and a catastrophe to a 1×3×1 eye slit, which came out at 2.4×4.4×2.4 — nearly three times the size it was drawn, showing texels it was never painted with. A box now takes at most a quarter of its own smallest side as growth and receives the rest as a move outward; a box that never touches the body takes nothing. Valthera Legacy's helmet measured 11.9 wide against 9.4 on the other sets, and is 10.0 now.
• Valthera Legacy flickered — 163 coplanar same-facing pairs for the depth buffer to argue over. Every set reports zero now.
• Draconic and Solarium boots were invisible. Their sole cubes shipped with texture coordinates and no painted pixels at all.
• Drakeguard's eye slits were invisible — the faceplate had moved out in front of them.
• Weapons are held by the grip, and are half again larger. The display translation belongs to the scale: a model is scaled about its own centre and then moved into the hand, so a blade drawn larger has its grip further from that centre. Raising the scale and leaving the translation alone is why two weapons were being held halfway up the blade.

Balance

Every weapon's damage was measured against the other end-game swords in the pack rather than guessed. Theirs run 12 to 44; ours ran 9 to 20, so the whole of our end game sat below the middle of theirs. The ladder is unchanged in shape and now reads 12 at the dormant relic, 18 and 24 through the Champion's Trials, 28 to 38 across the end-game blades, and 44 on Kaelo's Blade.

The astral shard is craftable at last — eight amethyst and a pinch of arcane dust. It fell out of six vanilla structure chests and nothing else, which put Lumina, the four seeking eyes, astralium itself and two more blades behind a finite supply of loot.