RagnaroK: Age of Pantheons

RagnaroK: Age of Pantheons — Beta 1 to Beta 36

**Minecraft 1.20.1 · Forge 47.x · Java 17 · Client and server**

RagnaroK: Age of Pantheons turns Minecraft into a civilization-building, settlement-management, and ancient-warfare experience. This post covers everything added and improved from the first public beta through **Beta 36**.

> This is a beta release. Visual polish, balance, AI edge cases, and world-generation frequency are still being refined with player feedback.

## Eight playable civilizations

Build, recruit, and defend with eight distinct cultures:

- Ancient Greece
- Roman Empire
- Ancient Egypt
- Mexica Empire
- Achaemenid Persia
- Celtic Tribes
- Han China
- Vikings

Every civilization includes its own visual identity, 3D equipment, settlement palette, workers, military units, buildings, and cultural environment.

## Units, equipment, and progression

### Raise a real cultural army

Each civilization now provides:

- Infantry, archers, mounted warriors, and a clearly identifiable elite unit.
- Cultural villagers with farmer, miner, lumberjack, excavator, and builder roles.
- Complete armor sets with custom 3D presentation.
- Unique melee weapons, bows, shields, axes, pickaxes, hoes, and shovels.
- Spawn eggs, translations, recipes, creative-tab access, and armor-set advancements.

Military equipment has received several visual passes during the beta:

- Weapons, bows, and shields use vanilla-compatible hand poses.
- Armor models were corrected to prevent floating cubes, internal geometry, and obstructed player layers.
- Viking armor atlas issues were fixed so the player face and base body remain visible.
- Tool UVs were normalized to remove texture bleeding, duplicated fragments, and invalid atlas sampling.

## Villages that feel alive

RagnaroK adds small villages and large cities for all eight cultures.

- Small settlements include six homes, twelve workers, and twelve guards.
- Large settlements include seven homes, eighteen workers, and eighteen guards.
- Villagers use persistent cultural clothing variants and daily schedules: work at dawn, social time at dusk, and return-home routines at night.
- Workers receive distributed, persistent work spots around their depots instead of piling up on one block.
- Cultural guards patrol their settlement perimeter, actively identify nearby hostile mobs, and protect villagers without attacking neutral visitors.
- Villagers can navigate wooden doors and recalculate bad routes instead of indefinitely standing against obstacles.
- Cultural settlements gain three-block-high walls, open gates, corner watch posts, lamps, and expanded patrol distribution.

### Richer settlement atmosphere

All settlement kits received cultural vanilla-block decoration: carpets, pottery, plants, candles, courtyards, community corners, markets, monuments, scarecrows, and regional street scenes.

Examples include Greek courtyards, Roman dry fountains, Egyptian palms, Mexica plazas, Persian gardens, Celtic hearths, Han gates, and Viking fishing stores. Decoration is kept away from main roads so units and villagers can move through the town.

## Build and govern an empire

### Claim one village as your domain

Town halls now support persistent leadership:

- Claim one settlement as your own government.
- Renounce or transfer leadership safely.
- Recruit units only inside your government territory.
- Use cultural recruitment stations at town halls, barracks, archery ranges, and cavalry buildings.
- Manage villagers through Village Centers and worker depots.

### Construction and village missions

Town hall construction is no longer a simple unrestricted menu.

- Buy cultural building plans through the town-hall interface.
- Builders construct approved plans gradually instead of placing a full structure in a single server tick.
- Early buildings are available immediately; advanced facilities unlock through village milestones.
- Population, militia, completed construction, and veteran recruitment unlock mines, Village Centers, barracks, archery ranges, and cavalry facilities.
- Locked plans are displayed clearly and never consume resources.

### Command your army

The leadership system now includes military orders:

- Rally troops.
- Restore village patrols.
- Defend the town hall.
- Attack nearby hostile mobs.
- Use the Command Banner to assign up to six nearby owned units to defend a selected position.

Orders, anchor positions, and unit ownership persist after saving and loading the world.

## Buildings and cultural infrastructure

Every civilization has a complete building kit:

- House
- Farm or granary
- Mine
- Lumber yard
- Town hall
- Village Center
- Barracks
- Cavalry facility
- Archery facility

The mod includes **72 authored cultural buildings** and **16 composed settlement templates**. Entrances, stairs, lighting, water containment, paths, and building accessibility were iterated throughout the beta.

Mines now contain an internal two-block-high **Work Iron Vein**. Miners safely gather raw iron, flint, or stone from this local resource instead of trying to path into dangerous caves or spawning fallback veins outside the settlement.

## World generation and the Grandes Reinos preset

### Cultural settlements in the world

Settlements are generated with data-driven world generation and cultural terrain requirements. Each faction searches for an appropriate regional setting instead of appearing randomly in a bad location:

- Greece and Rome prefer temperate plains and coasts.
- Egypt seeks major rivers with desert or badlands influence.
- Mexica settlements favor jungle lakes or highland settings.
- Persia favors savannas and plateaus.
- Celts prefer wooded hills.
- Han settlements seek fertile valleys and plains.
- Vikings favor taiga, cold forests, and coasts.

The first player in a world also receives a small cultural settlement near spawn. It is seed-determined, placed gradually, and registered only after completion.

### RagnaroK · Grandes Reinos

The optional **Grandes Reinos** world preset expands the scale of the Overworld while preserving vanilla caves, aquifers, ores, Nether, and End:

- Broad low-slope plains for settlements.
- Large regional mountain ranges with foothills, passes, valleys, plateaus, and concentrated cliffs.
- Long rivers, tributaries, lakes, deltas, wetlands, and conditional waterfalls.
- Extended coasts with beaches, bays, peninsulas, islands, and estuaries.
- Terrain auditing and multi-seed validation for settlement space, river corridors, mountains, and coastlines.

Vanilla village frequency is reduced in newly generated worlds while the mod is installed, leaving more suitable space for cultural settlements. Existing worlds and existing vanilla villages are not removed.

### Performance work

World generation and settlement construction received major optimization passes:

- Settlement placement, terrain supports, clearing, roads, and paths are processed in small batches instead of a single spike.
- Infrastructure limits itself to four chunks and a two-millisecond tick budget.
- Construction places one new layer at a time.
- Surface generation caches 2D terrain calculations and keeps decorations inside their own chunks.
- Profiling removed mod world features from the main hot paths, significantly improving new-world startup versus earlier betas.

## Roads, ports, and surrounding world detail

Nearby cultural settlements can register persistent centers and connect through roads. River crossings become wooden bridges, while appropriate coastal cities can gain a small spruce port.

The world also receives lightweight environmental structures: watchtowers, ruins, camps, frontier posts, standing stones, fallen logs, rock formations, lantern markers, abandoned rests, and regional desert or snowy details.

## Pantheons and cultural temples

The pantheon phase began in the later betas. Every current civilization has an initial temple or sanctuary, a functional altar, and a unique offering blessing:

| Civilization | Temple / sanctuary | Offering and blessing |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Greece | Temple of Athena | Emerald: Resistance + Haste |
| Rome | Temple of Mars | Iron Ingot: Strength + Resistance |
| Egypt | Solar Temple of Ra | Gold Ingot: Fire Resistance + Night Vision |
| Mexica | Dual Templo Mayor | Obsidian: Strength + Speed; Clay Ball: Water Breathing + Luck |
| Persia | Royal Sanctuary of Ahura Mazda | Lapis Lazuli: Resistance + Luck |
| Celts | Nemeton of Toutatis | Oak Sapling: Resistance + Regeneration in a nearby radius |
| Han China | Altar of Heaven and Hall of Ancestors | Amethyst: Slow Falling + Night Vision; Paper: Regeneration + Luck |
| Vikings | Hof of Thor | Copper Ingot: Strength + Resistance |

Temple commands are available for testing through `/ar templo <deity>`, including `atenea`, `marte`, `ra`, `mexica`, `ahura_mazda`, `toutatis`, `han`, and `thor`.

## Beta 36: quality and release work

Beta 36 makes the release pipeline more trustworthy:

- Added **six real Forge GameTests** rather than relying only on a successful server boot.
- Tests cover Thor and Tiān blessings, Han and Viking ritual structures, recruitment-station registration, and military-order serialization.
- The release JAR is now **byte-for-byte reproducible**: build timestamps were removed from the manifest and archive ordering/timestamps are fixed.
- Two clean consecutive builds produced the same SHA-256 checksum.
- Automatically placed hanging paintings were temporarily removed after rotation-safe validation found unsupported placements in some templates. Block-based cultural decoration remains in place.

## Known beta limitations

- Settlement frequency and visual adaptation in extreme mountains, ravines, and dense forests will continue to be tuned.
- Worker and builder navigation can still need adjustment around complex doors, steep terrain, and unusual player-made paths.
- Workers safely produce and deliver resources, but do not yet break real world blocks.
- Unit combat balance, recruitment costs, and economy values are not final.
- Client-side visual QA remains important for every temple blessing, GUI, and generated settlement layout.

## Compatibility

- Minecraft **1.20.1**
- Forge **47.x**
- Java **17**
- Client and dedicated server
- No required external dependencies

Thank you for testing the beta. Feedback, screenshots, crash reports, and world-generation seeds are especially helpful while the Age of Pantheons expands with more civilizations and deities.