Portables Beacons

Portable Beacons

A Portable Beacon in your inventory projects beacon effects on you, and — once it can share — on the people around you. Which effects, how far, how strong, how widely and what it costs are all configured in the beacon's own screen.

It is deliberately not a beacon replacement. Every tier consumes a Beacon block in its recipe, the aura tops out at 16 blocks against the block's 20–50, and an effect your own beacon already provides costs nothing. The block stays the better choice for a base; this is what you take with you.

Four tiers, and three that specialise

Cinder, Void and Tidal beacons sit alongside tier III with narrow pools drawn from effects the vanilla beacon never offered — Fire Resistance, Slow Falling, Water Breathing, Conduit Power, Dolphin's Grace. Carrying one instead of a Beacon IV is a trade, not a downgrade.

Both ceilings above can be raised by augments, and both are datapack fields.

Fourteen augments, four slots

Seven are pure gains: more reach, more effects at once, higher levels, cheaper fuel, a bigger buffer, wider sharing, or no particles at all. One of each type per beacon, most with three tiers.

The other seven give something up, and those are the interesting ones. Wellspring runs your most expensive effect for nothing and charges more for the rest. Communion makes sharing cheap and everything else dearer. Wayfarer and Sentinel are opposites — one is cheap while you travel, the other while you hold a position. Recluse cuts your fuel to roughly a third, triples your buffer and hides your particles, in exchange for sharing with nobody at all.

With at most four slots, the question is never which augment you want. It is which four.

Sharing is earned, not given. Reaching beyond your own team costs an Attunement augment, and therefore an augment slot — which is the decision, since the slot could have held more range or cheaper fuel instead.

Fuel you can read

Copper through netherite, priced by a datapack — per item, or by a convention tag, so a modded metal is accepted without a file of its own. The screen shows remaining runtime, not a unit count: "4 h" answers the question you actually have. Each effect chooses its own level and its own audience, and both cost more, so a beacon is a set of small trades rather than one switch.

Fuel can be switched off entirely in the config, and when it is, every trace of it disappears from the screen rather than sitting there inert.

Data-driven, properly

Four datapack registries: which effects a beacon may project and what they cost, what augments do, what each tier is worth, and what burns as fuel. The mod's own content ships through exactly that mechanism — there is no private path. Adding another mod's effect, or a whole themed beacon, is a JSON file. See the datapack guide.

Compatibility

• Curios (optional): wear a beacon in the charm slot, and it works exactly like a carried one. Ships configured; nothing to set up.
• JEI (optional): all fifteen augments listed separately instead of collapsing into one, plus a fuel category showing what each item is worth as runtime. EMI the same, on 1.21.1.
• Server-side config, synced to clients. Required on both sides.

Permissions

Modpacks: yes. No permission needed, no message required, public or private, monetised or not, on any platform or launcher. If you are reading this to find out whether you may include Portable Beacons, the answer is yes and you can stop reading.

Credit is appreciated and never required.

Forks and addons: yes, under the MIT terms. Please do not publish a fork under the name Portable Beacons — the name is not covered by the licence, and two mods sharing one name only confuses players trying to work out which one broke their world.

Assets — icons, GUI artwork, logo — are the one exception: redistribute them with the mod freely, but do not lift them into another project.