Runic Skills

Level ten skills through the actions you already take. Runic Skills adds a quiet, vanilla-respecting RPG progression layer to Minecraft 1.20.1 — swing a sword to raise Strength, cast a spell to raise Magic, plant a farm to raise Wisdom. Each skill funds perks and passives you pick yourself, and titles you earn for the rare milestones a normal world never sees.

Minecraft 1.20.1 · Forge 47.3.0+ · Java 17 Forked from JustLevelingFork and substantially reworked. Free, open source, Apache-2.0 licensed.

What makes Runic Skills different

Most "RPG skills" mods make you grind against a separate track. Runic Skills piggy-backs on the things you already do in a survival world:

• Ten skills, ten play-styles. Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Building, Wisdom, Magic, Fortune, Tinkering. Melee players, archers, mages, farmers, miners, and engineers each have a natural primary track.
• Perks are abilities, not permanent stats. You unlock them at skill breakpoints, you can toggle them on and off from the Skills screen, and many have multiple ranks (e.g. Haggler I / II / III deepens villager discounts; Wormhole Storage opens your ender chest from the inventory screen). Choose the ones that fit your playstyle.
• Passives are your stat spend. Spend skill points into passive tiers: +Attack Damage, +Max Health, +Mana Regen, +Armor Toughness, +Movement Speed, +Projectile Damage — all via the vanilla/Apothic attribute system, so they stack correctly with gear and other mods.
• Titles are rare, visible, and earned. ~50 titles for milestones like slayer of the Ender Dragon, conqueror of the Warden, master enchanter. Pick one to display above your name once you've earned it. Other players see it too.
• Item lock-gating — optionally lock powerful armour, weapons, and tools behind skill thresholds. Throw someone a Netherite sword before their Strength is high enough and they literally can't swing it. Configurable per-item via the in-game config GUI.

Mod compatibility

Runic Skills is built to feel like part of your modpack rather than an island. Optional integrations light up automatically when their mods are installed:

• Ars Nouveau — Magic scales spell damage, mana-regen passives, glyph mastery perk.
• Botania — 42 rune-tiered perks spanning Wisdom and Magic. Elemental/Seasonal/Sin/Gaia tiers echo Botania's own rune progression; perks pay in and siphon from your carried Mana Tablets/Bands and nearby Mana Pools. Icons reuse Botania's own 16×16 item textures directly (no redistribution). Auto-detects Botania, zero crash risk when absent.
• Irons Spellbooks — Spell echo, arcane shield, attunement perks, school bonuses, spell gating by Magic level.
• Apotheosis & Apothic Attributes — Affix, gem, and socket awareness. Broader attribute pool for passives.
• KubeJS — Script your own skills, perks, passives, titles, and conditions. A SKILL_LEVELUP event is exposed.
• L2Tabs / Legendary Tabs — Skills shows up as a native tab in those mods' strips instead of being drawn twice.
• FTB Quests (since 1.3.0) — Six native task types (runicskills:skill_level, global_level, perk_rank, passive_level, title_unlocked, title_selected) so quest authors can gate FTB Quests on Runic Skills progression. Sticky completion by default; opt-in "sticky": false for live-threshold semantics. Backfills on login.
• Custom skill visuals (since 1.3.0) — Override per-skill overview/detail/background art with a single datapack JSON per skill at data/<ns>/runicskills/skill_visuals/<id>.json. Accepts arbitrary namespace:path texture ids so pack authors can point at any mod's item or texture sprite without shipping copies under the runicskills namespace.
• Farmers Delight, Blood Magic, Ice and Fire, Cataclysm, Mowzie's Mobs, Enigmatic Legacy, Stalwart Dungeons, Bosses of Mass Destruction, Siege Machines, Saints Dragons, Samurai Dynasty, Nichirin Dynasty, Natures Aura, More Vanilla, Fantasy Armor, Jewelcraft, Locks — Auto-generated level-gate lock lists for each.
• Crayfish Gun Mod (unofficial), Scorched Guns 2, TacZ, PointBlank (Vic's) — Gun-fire events honour Runic Skills perks and locks.

Every integration is optional. Runic Skills detects missing mods at runtime — no silent class-not-found crashes, no hard dependencies beyond Forge and YACL.

Requirements

• Minecraft Forge 47.3.0+ on Minecraft 1.20.1.
• YACL (Yet Another Config Lib v3) 3.4.2+ — client-side only, used for the in-game config GUI. Grab it from the YACL CurseForge page or Modrinth.

That's it. Everything else is optional.

Installation

1. Install Minecraft Forge for 1.20.1.
2. Download the Runic Skills jar.
3. Drop it in your .minecraft/mods/ folder. Add YACL to the same folder if you don't have it yet.
4. Launch. Press Y in-game to open the Skills screen (or click the Skills tab next to your inventory tab).

Works on single-player, LAN, and dedicated servers. Same jar on client and server.

Controls and UI

• Y (default, rebindable in Controls) — open Skills screen.
• Skills tab — appears next to the inventory tab. With L2Tabs or Legendary Tabs installed, uses those mods' tab systems natively so the UI stays consistent with your modpack.
• Mouse-hover a perk, hold Shift — see description, level requirement, rank, and when your next rank unlocks.
• Overlay warnings — a skill requirement overlay appears briefly when you try to use a gated item you can't yet wield.

For modpack makers

• Every number is in a config. Skill max level, XP curves, lock-item lists, title requirements, per-integration toggles. You can tune the whole pack from config/runicskills-common.json5 (editable via the in-game config GUI as well).
• Titles are data-driven. Datapack JSON under data/runicskills/titles/ — ship your own title pack by dropping files in your pack. Reload live with /skills reload.
• KubeJS scripting. Register custom skills, perks, passives, titles, and condition types from server scripts. See the KubeJS scripting hook section of the README for examples.
• Sided-imports lint runs at build time — no net.minecraft.client.* code leaks into common-side logic, so the mod is safe on dedicated servers. Repeatedly audited for packet-deserialization security (see the 0.9.2 CHANGELOG entry).

Commands (ops only, permission level 2)

• /skills <player> <skill> <level> — set a player's skill.
• /skills <player> <skill> add <amount> — nudge up or down.
• /skills <player> list — print all ten skill levels.
• /skills respec <player> — refund passives and perks without touching skill levels.
• /skills register <item-id> — runtime-lock an item.
• /skills reload — re-read the titles and lock-items datapack.
• /globallimit <cap> — cap the total-skill sum.
• /titles <player> <title> set true|false — grant or revoke a title.

What's new in 1.3.2

• Skill-panel header text is legible again. The skill name, level/rank line, player name + XP, and "Choose Your Title" heading all render in black on the light gray panel background instead of white-on-white-ish. Pure cosmetic — no behaviour change, no save change.

What's new in 1.3.1

• No more "Error loading class" WARN at startup when BetterCombat or PointBlank aren't installed. 1.2.1's @Pseudo fix silenced one of the two startup WARNs for those optional-target mixins; 1.3.1 finishes the job with a Mixin Config Plugin that gates the mixins on LoadingModList presence so Mixin never even asks the classloader for the missing target classes. Save-compatible with 1.3.0; no NBT, no protocol, no config changes.

What's new in 1.3.0

Two data-driven features for pack authors:

• Custom skill visuals. A new datapack folder at data/<ns>/runicskills/skill_visuals/*.json lets you override per-skill overview/detail/background art. Each field is optional — fill in just the slot you want to override, the rest fall through to the legacy defaults. Texture ids accept either bare paths (resolved to runicskills: for parity with prior KubeJS scripts) or fully-qualified namespace:path ResourceLocations. KubeJS Perk.add(...) / Passive.add(...) helpers also accept namespaced texture ids now, so scripts can point directly at any mod's item sprite without copying assets under the runicskills namespace. Reloads pick up overrides via /reload or world load.
• FTB Quests integration. Six native task types — skill_level, global_level, perk_rank, passive_level, title_unlocked, title_selected — registered via FTB Quests' official TaskType API. Sticky completion by default (matching the "checked off, stays checked" UX players expect); opt-in "sticky": false per task for live-threshold semantics that reset on respec / passive level-down. Login + respawn + respec trigger a full task re-evaluation so quests added retroactively complete for already-qualified players. Master toggle enableFTBQuestsIntegration = true in the common config. Tested against FTB Quests Forge [2001.4,) (2001.4.22 at release). The integration is reflectively loaded so the mod boots cleanly when FTB Quests isn't installed — zero classloading risk, identical to the existing KubeJS / Ars Nouveau / Botania pattern.

Save-compatible with 1.2.x. No NBT, no PROTOCOL_VERSION bump, no new packets. Both features are entirely additive — every existing skill, perk, passive, title, and integration toggle continues to work exactly as before.

What's new in 1.1.0

• Dedicated server now genuinely runs without YACL. Pre-1.1.0 the README claimed YACL was not required server-side, but the mod's static initializer eager-loaded YACL classes during construction; servers without YACL crashed with NoClassDefFoundError. The config layer has been refactored: a new server-safe ConfigHolder<T> replaces YACL's ConfigClassHandler for all four handler classes, persistence runs through plain Gson (with a JSON5-comment stripper for backward compatibility), and the YACL UI moves behind a client-only builder reached via reflection. mods.toml flips YACL to mandatory=false. Existing runicskills.common.json5 files load cleanly — field names unchanged.
• L2Tabs no-mod boot crash fixed. Same JVM-verifier eager-resolution shape as the 1.0.0 Legendary Tabs fix; this one was missed at the time. ClientProxy used to inline a lambda referencing TabRegistry.registerTab(...), which the verifier eager-loaded BaseTab for and crashed when L2Tabs was absent. Extracted to a L2TabsClientIntegration::registerTab method reference so the lambda body no longer holds the dangerous types.
• /globallimit works in-game again. The command had a backwards guard that rejected every player invocation as "client-side", leaving only the dedicated-server console / rcon path working. Reported on CurseForge.
• Scholar perk no longer hides every enchantment in the world when disabled. Adding "scholar" to disabledPerks (the natural way to "turn off" the perk) used to flip a global enchantment-name-hiding mixin, replacing every enchantment label on every item with a "Requires Scholar" placeholder. Decoupled: the new enableScholarEnchantmentHiding config (default off) is the only knob that controls hiding; the Scholar perk is now solely about its XP/enchanting bonus. Reported on CurseForge.
• disabledPerks and disabledPassives now appear in the in-game config UI. Both fields existed in the JSON5 file but were missing the @AutoGen annotation, so the YACL screen never rendered them. Reported on CurseForge ("how do you disable certain perks?").
• Charge Mastery has a real effect. Previously inert (the 1.0.2 changelog admitted ISS 3.x has no CastType.CHARGE). Now boosts CastType.LONG spell damage by chargeMasteryPercent (default +25%), modelling "released at full power regardless of how briefly held". Stacks multiplicatively with Long Channel.
• 24 deferred Botania perks default-disabled. The 1.0.1 changelog admitted that 24 Botania perks were registered with blank handlers pending future implementation. Until those handlers ship, every affected perk's *RequiredLevel defaults to -1, eliding them from the tree by default. Pack authors who want them visible (e.g. for a future patch) can set the level back. The list is in CHANGELOG.md.
• Per-integration "Generated N lock items" log lines demoted from INFO to DEBUG. CurseForge user reported "ice and fire disabled repeating forever"; this likely was the closest source on busy reload cycles.
• Network protocol bumped 4 → 5. Old clients hitting a 1.1.0 server (and vice versa) get a clean connection refusal rather than silent state corruption.
• Save-compatible with 1.0.2. No NBT changes. Existing JSON5 config files load cleanly.

What's new in 1.0.2

• 78 new magic-tree perks across four integrations. Every perk null-registers when its source mod is missing, so the tree silently collapses to whatever you actually have installed — no crash, no orphan icons.
• Iron's Spells 'n Spellbooks — 46 perks. Generic mana and casting: Wellspring (+max mana), Quickening (+cast speed), Reservoir (+mana regen), Tempo (+cooldown reduction), Arcane Recovery (mana on kill, scales with victim max HP), Focus (resist cast-interrupt on long casts), Mana Bulwark (redirect incoming damage into mana at 2:1), Arcane Reprieve (instant 40% mana refill the first time you hit zero, then 120s cooldown), Mana Surge (below-25% HP burst of +spell-power and +regen), Spellweaver (every 5th cast inside a 10-second combo window costs nothing), Resonant Casting (above 95% mana: +damage), Imbued Focus (+1 effective spell level on all casts), Quickcast (−CD on INSTANT spells), Long Channel (+damage on LONG casts), Continuous Flow (−per-tick mana on CONTINUOUS casts). Per-school triplets for all nine schools (Fire, Ice, Lightning, Holy, Ender, Blood, Evocation, Nature, Eldritch): an X-mancer (spell power), an X-Warded (resist), and an X-Catalyst that rolls a 1-in-N chance each cast to apply the school's signature ISS effect — Immolate / Chilled / Charged / Fortify / Planar Sight / Rend / Echoing Strikes / Oakskin / Abyssal Shroud. Plus summon perks: Lord of the Dead (+damage and +HP on your summons) and Life Leech Bound (your summons' damage returns to you as mana). Also adds the previously-missing Eldritch Attunement gate.
• Apotheosis + Apothic Attributes — 12 perks. Socket Virtuoso (+1 socket on every equipped item). Affix Affinity (every Rare-or-better affix item you wear adds +2% damage and +2% damage reduction, capped at 90%). Ten stat-sticks that layer permanent modifiers on attributeslib:*: Apothic Critical Mastery (+crit chance/damage), Vampiric Fangs (+life steal), Reaper's Edge (+current-HP damage), Evasive (+dodge chance), Arrow Mastery (+arrow damage and velocity), Earthbreaker (+mining speed), Apothic Scholar (+XP gained), Spectral Ward (+prot pierce and shred), Ghostbound (+ghost health), Heart of the Healer (+healing received and overheal).
• Ars Nouveau — 11 perks. Form Focus triad filters by the form glyph on the front of your spell — Form Focus: Projectile and Form Focus: Self cut mana cost, Form Focus: Touch adds damage. Wild Manipulation cuts mana cost on any spell containing a Manipulation-school glyph. Per-school specialists: Hedgewitch (Water cost + damage), Emberforged (Fire damage), Stormcaller (Air damage), Geomancer (Earth damage), Conjurer (Conjuration cost), Abjurer (Abjuration effect magnitude), Arcane Weaver (Manipulation damage, complements Wild Manipulation's cost side). All cost reductions floor at 1 Source so stacking discounts can't make a spell free.
• Cross-mod synergy — 9 perks that only light up when multiple source mods are installed together.
  • Six Schoolbridges (need Iron's + Ars): your ISS per-school spell power bleeds into the matching Ars school's damage. Fire → ELEMENTAL_FIRE, Ice → ELEMENTAL_WATER, Lightning → ELEMENTAL_AIR, Nature → ELEMENTAL_EARTH, Holy → ABJURATION, Ender → MANIPULATION.
  • Unified Arcana (Iron's + Ars): a percent of every Ars cast's Source cost refunds back to your Iron's mana pool on success.
  • Triple Threat (Iron's + Ars + Apotheosis): +5% max mana, mana regen, and spell power while all three are loaded.
  • Affix Focus (Iron's + Apotheosis): wearing 4+ Rare-or-better Apotheosis items grants +1 effective spell level on all Iron's casts.
• Configurable everything. Every new perk has a requiredLevel config (set to -1 to disable), plus per-perk tuning (percentages, thresholds, cooldowns). Admins can null-out any perk they don't want in their pack without editing the jar.
• Save-compatible with 1.0.1. No NBT or protocol changes. Drop the new jar in and keep playing.

What's new in 1.0.1

• Botania integration — 42 new perks. A full perk tree across Wisdom and Magic, structured around Botania's own rune progression (Elemental / Seasonal / Sin / Gaia). Lights up automatically when Botania is in your modpack; stays silent otherwise. No hard dependency, no crash when Botania is missing.
• Wisdom tree (19 perks). Petal-Reader, Rune of Mana: Resonance, Sparkle-Sense, Dowser's Twig, Green Thumb, Livingbark Student, Agricultor's Eye, Forager's Palate, Loot-Hunter's Intuition, Still Listener, Manaseer's Lens, Corporea Query, Cartographer-Prospector, Far Reach, Lazy Swap, Mirror's Read, Elven Knowledge, Gaia's Witness, Oracle of the Nine Runes.
• Magic tree (23 perks). Inner Wellspring, Rune of Water: Tidewoven, Rune of Fire: Emberheart, Rune of Earth: Stone-Rooted, Rune of Air: Featherstep, Band of Aura, Spring: Verdant Pulse, Summer: Solar Conduit, Autumn: Harvest Tithe, Winter: Frostbound, Lens Velocity, Lens Potency, Lust: Pixie Affinity, Gluttony: Cake Combustion, Greed: Magnetite, Sloth: Unbound Step, Envy: Mirrored Wrath, Pride: Crown of Reach, Wrath: Thundercall, Gaia's Gift: Relic Attunement, Terrasteel Ascension, Flügel's Grace, Manastorm.
• Hard-integration details. Hooks Botania's ManaProficiencyEvent, ManaDiscountEvent, and Mana Pool capabilities via BotaniaForgeCapabilities.MANA_RECEIVER / ManaItemHandler. Inner Wellspring trickle-charges your inventory mana items from nearby Mana Pools; Rune of Water: Tidewoven adds an additive mana-cost discount while wet; Rune of Mana: Resonance promotes tool mana-proficiency; everything else leans on vanilla combat/tick/block-break events.
• Icons match Botania. Every perk uses a unique Botania item texture as its icon — the 16 runes for their namesake perks, lens_speed/lens_power/lens_storm for the lens perks, reach_ring for Far Reach, magnet_ring for Magnetite, aura_ring for Band of Aura, flight_tiara for Flügel's Grace, terrasteel_ingot for Terrasteel Ascension, king_key for Relic Attunement, monocle/itemfinder/sextant/divining_rod/mana_mirror for the perception perks, and so on. No textures are bundled; the mod points at Botania's own assets.
• Save-compatible with 1.0.0. No NBT or protocol changes. Drop the new jar in and keep playing.

What's new in 1.0.0

• First stable release. Consolidates the full 0.9.x line into a single 1.0 milestone; no further pre-1.0 versions will be cut.
• Tooltip matches enforcement. Disabling the item-lock master toggle (enableItemLocks = false) now also hides the "Requirements:" block from item tooltips. Previously the text remained, so players who unlocked items via config still saw stale "Requires Level X" warnings and thought the lock was still active.
• Server owners and pack makers get five new knobs for balancing the perk/passive system. Defaults are behavior-preserving, so updating from 0.9.7 changes nothing until you opt in.
• Global active-perk cap (maxActivePerks). Answers the top-requested "how many perks can I have active at once" question. 0 = unlimited. Iron's Spells school attunements count against this cap in addition to their own ironsMaxSchoolSelections limit.
• Per-perk and per-passive kill switches (disabledPerks, disabledPassives). Lists of registry names that can't be enabled or leveled up; effects are fully suppressed but save data is preserved, so re-enabling restores state. No more "delete the whole integration" to nerf one perk.
• Perk-swap cooldown (perkSwapCooldownTicks). Stops rapid-fire swapping between perks between fights. Cooldown persists through logout.
• Skill level-up cost multiplier (skillLevelUpCostMultiplier). Tune vanilla XP cost up or down. 1.0 = vanilla, 2.0 = twice as expensive, 0.5 = half price.
• Data-driven perk groups via datapack. Drop a JSON into data/<pack>/perk_groups/ with { "max_active": N, "perks": [...] } to enforce mutual-exclusion or custom caps on any subset of perks. Plays nicely alongside the hardcoded Iron's Spells school limit — both systems run independently.
• Server-authoritative everywhere. Every new check rejects with a SyncSkillCapabilityCP resync so clients can't desync from server rules. /skillsreload propagates config and datapack changes without requiring anyone to relog.
• Protocol version bumped to 4. Clients and servers must update together — old clients connected to new servers (and vice versa) will get a clean connection refusal rather than a silent wire-format bug.
• Fixed: mod now loads cleanly without Legendary Tabs. An inline lambda in the client-setup path caused the JVM verifier to eager-resolve sfiomn.* classes at mod construction, so the mod crashed with NoClassDefFoundError: TabBase whenever Legendary Tabs wasn't installed — ignoring the runtime isModLoaded() guard. Isolated the optional-mod references into a dedicated wrapper method so classes only load when Legendary Tabs is actually present. Runic Skills is now a clean optional dependency again.
• Fixed: skill-selection hover highlight is now aligned with the button. The 74×26 green halo was being squashed into the 66-pixel button rect due to an incorrect textureWidth argument; it's now blitted at its true dimensions, centred around the button with a 4px outer glow.
• Fixed: skill-selection tooltip is no longer overpainted by adjacent cells. Deferred the tooltip render until after the grid loop so no later cell can draw on top of it.

What's new in 0.9.6

• Skills tab blends seamlessly into the Legendary Tabs strip. It now blits its sword icon directly from Legendary Tabs' own atlas, so the frame shape, shading, hover state, and "currently selected" treatment are byte-for-byte identical to every neighbouring tab.
• Skills always appears right after the Inventory tab. Default priority lowered to 15, slotting Skills between Inventory (priority 10) and every other known integration (20+).
• Tab strip stays stable as you move between inventory screens. Opening Skills no longer collapses the strip to a lone icon — every tab on the vanilla inventory now appears on the Skills page in the same order and X position. Conversely, opening a companion screen (Medkit, Curios, Backpack, etc.) no longer hides the Skills tab.

What's new in 0.9.5

• Native Legendary Tabs integration. Skills now participates in Legendary Tabs' own strip instead of being drawn on top of it. Priority is configurable.
• Major audit and remediation pass. Two crash bugs (Better Combat attack-range modifiers; PointBlank skill-gated gun fire), multiple NPE paths in pre-sync tooltip/overlay rendering, matrix-stack leak in the tab renderer, and several config and capability guardrails fixed. See the full CHANGELOG.
• Translations across 17 languages — new lang keys for perk ranks and the title-edit button, translated for every language the mod already supports (Arabic, German, English, Spanish ×7, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese-Brazilian, Russian, Simplified Chinese).
• Internal performance. KubeJS level-up hook now caches its reflection lookups. RecipeBook.isVisible() is cached per render frame. Villager haggler-delta map self-cleans.

Reporting bugs and requesting features

• GitHub issues is the best place.
• If reporting a crash, attach logs/latest.log, your mod list, and if config-related your config/runicskills-common.json5.
• Pull requests welcome — the project is Apache-2.0.

Credits

• Otectus — current maintainer, rebrand, GUI rework, audit, Legendary Tabs integration.
• JustLevelingFork — the original fork base.
• Each third-party mod we integrate with is owned by and credited to its respective author. Runic Skills does not bundle their code; integrations are thin optional compat layers.

Thanks for installing — drop feedback on the issues tracker. Happy levelling.