Pseudocore

A single low-tech fantasy item line, the Pseudocore, that captures a mob with all of its data, holds it safely, and lets you carry it, sell it, or trade it to another player. The mob inside keeps everything: its name, its health, its inventory, its owner, and any modded data stored on it.

The line comes in twelve tiers, each with a higher capture limit than the last, plus a separate five-tier dragon line for Ice and Fire's dragons.

Inspiration

This mod draws on three sources:

• Ice and Fire CE - Ice and Fire's Dragon Horn is the model for the whole concept: a vessel item that captures a mob with all of its data, shows it in a labelled tooltip, and hands ownership off when it is released. The capture guards, the tooltip layout, and the ownership-transfer idea all follow that design.
• Tensura: Reincarnated - Tensura contributed the progression layer: EP (energy points) shown for captured mobs, named variants, magic crystals as the craft ingredients of the tier recipes, and the metal tiers that the pseudocore line is built on.
• The Pseudocores of the Tensura anime and manga - the item's design follows theirs, and they are where the mod's name comes from.

The two mods are optional at runtime: Pseudocore runs standalone and only layers their content in when the corresponding mod is present.

What a pseudocore does

To capture, right-click a mob and store it. The mob's entire data is written into the item, so nothing about it is lost, which is what makes it safe to trade. Capture is guarded:

• You can only capture a mob that is ownerless, or that you own. Never someone else's pet.
• A mob that is leashed or carrying a rider cannot be captured.

To release, use the item on the top of a block. The mob comes out exactly as captured, at its original identity, so anything bound to that mob by ID (deeds and the like) still resolves.

Trade needs nothing but the item itself, because the mob lives entirely in it. Whoever holds the core and releases the mob gets the same mob.

What's inside (tooltip)

A filled pseudocore always shows its contents, in this order:

Variants read naturally (Red Fang Direwolf, Emerald Fire Dragon, Black Hippogryph), covering Ice and Fire, Tensura, Mobs of Mythology and Mysticism. An empty pseudocore shows a hint instead, together with the capture caps its tier enforces (see the tier tables below).

While Tensura is installed, the EP line and the Tensura-recorded owner follow Tensura's own analysis rules: a holder whose analysis cannot reach a mob's EP reads it blurred the same way Tensura's own overlay blurs it, and a holder with no analysis at all sees neither line. Vanilla-tamed owners are never hidden, and name, race and health are always shown. This can be switched off in config/pseudocore-common.toml (respectAnalysisGating).

Appearance

The item's look follows the Pseudocores of Tensura's anime and manga: a vessel with a single coloured orb. When a mob is stored, only the item's orb changes, tinting to a vivid version of that mob's spawn-egg color. Mob types with no spawn egg get a stable color derived from their id. Each tier's body also carries its metal's colour: the iron tier's texture is drawn with it already, and the rest are tinted from it.

The tier line

Every beast-tier pseudocore captures the same way; what separates the tiers is how much EP the mob inside may have. EP is read from Tensura, so the caps only matter while Tensura is installed and the integration is on.

Every cap is configurable per tier in config/pseudocore-server.toml ([pseudocore.tiers.<tier>]), including whether the tier may capture tamed or Tensura-named mobs. A tier that refuses a capture says so, naming the mob.

Each tier has two recipes, shaped around the tier's ingots (tags like c:ingots/copper, so any mod's metal works): one uses the Tensura magic crystal of the matching quality and exists only while Tensura's integration is active, the other uses any gem from c:gems and exists only while that integration is off. One of the two is always craftable, whichever way the pack is built. Every tier also sits in its own Pseudocore creative tab, and there is nothing to configure before you use one.

Ice and Fire's dragons: the dragon line

Pseudocore does capture Ice and Fire's dragons, but never with a beast pseudocore. They are blacklisted there, alongside 62 bosses, eight Tensura and Mysticism encounter mobs and villagers/colonists (79 ids in all, editable in config/pseudocore-server.toml), so a beast core can't be used to pocket an encounter. The capture attempt simply refuses, naming the mob.

Dragons are captured with the dragon pseudocores, a five-tier line of their own that speaks IaF's own capture language: the same ownership guard (you capture a dragon you own, never someone else's), and a second growth-stage cap so a starter core can't pocket an ancient wyrm.

Dragon tiers also take the same tamed/named switches, in [pseudocore.dragonTiers.<tier>] of the same file. Stage is derived the way Ice and Fire derives it for the living dragon: its own age bands over the pack's configured growth schedule, so a 512-day growth clock reads stage 1 where stock 128-day growth reads stage 4. Release works like the beast line, at the dragon's original identity and ownership.

Dragon pseudocore recipes are built from c:bones/dragon, the tier's ingots and a magic crystal (or a gem, as above), and only exist while Ice and Fire is installed; the dragon line is the one part of the mod that needs a mod to be craftable at all. Ice and Fire's own Dragon Horn recipe is disabled by the bundled override data pack, and Ice and Fire's dragon-horn advancements are reworked to point at the dragon pseudocores instead. The horn item itself is untouched; other datapacks can still enable or re-add it however they like. The dragon tiers sit in the mod's own creative tab.

Optional ownership transfer (off by default)

Releasing a mob never changes who owns it, unless a server opts in:

/gamerule pseudocoreOwnershipTransfer true
/gamerule pseudocoreDragonOwnershipTransfer true

Turning an integration off

Ice and Fire CE and Tensura can each be switched off without uninstalling them, in config/pseudocore-common.toml:

The switch is honoured in code and in data packs alike, so it also works on a server whose modpack still has the mod installed. The entity blacklist lives in its own file, config/pseudocore-server.toml.

Dependencies

Variant names for Mobs of Mythology (drake, sporeling) and Mysticism (okami) come through Mob Info Common, so neither mod needs to be installed for Pseudocore to load; each name is read only when its own mod is present.

Pseudocore runs standalone, and every integration above is independent. Without one, the item still works and just omits that mod's names or extras.

Credits

• Capture/release approach and the ownership hand-off modeled on Ice and Fire / Ice and Fire CE (LGPL); attribution is in NOTICE.md.
• EP display, tier progression, and metal/crystal theming inspired by Tensura: Reincarnated.
• Item design, the vessel and its single coloured orb, inspired by the Pseudocores of the Tensura anime and manga, which is also where the mod's name comes from.

License

GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 -- see LICENSE. Copyright (c) 2026 Bitwise Madness.

AI disclosure

Parts of this project were written with the assistance of AI coding tools. AI-assisted code, data and documentation ship only after human review by the maintainers.

In-game config editing

Mods built with this template can be edited in-game with Configured - install it like any other mod; it adds no code to this one. Open the mod list, select a mod, press Config, and change values directly: Configured writes through NeoForge's config system, so a reload applies the new values without restarting the game.

This template pre-wires the config-screen background in src/main/templates/META-INF/neoforge.mods.toml ([modproperties.${mod_id}] configuredBackground) - point it at any texture you like. Note Configured only shows a menu for mods that actually register a config: a template-derived mod with no registered settings has nothing to show.