Runic Tome

One tome. Every manual.

Tired of inventory chests stuffed with duplicate guide books? Losing your "Materials and You" to a lava pocket? Dragging eight lexicons between bases every time you move? Runic Tome fixes that.

Runic Tome gives every player a single, persistent book called the Runic Tome. The moment any guide book enters your inventory — pickup, craft, quest reward, command, anything — the tome quietly absorbs it. The physical book vanishes; a new entry appears in your tome's library. One item, forever.

Open the tome to browse every manual you've ever collected. Click an entry. The real book opens, native UI and all.

✨ Features

Absorbs every guide book you touch. Ground pickup, crafting output, smelting output, quest rewards, KubeJS grants, /give commands, container close — all paths covered. Event-driven paths absorb within one tick; a configurable fallback sweep catches anything that bypasses Forge events.
One item, forever. The tome is given on your first world join, has Epic rarity, stacks to 1, and is fire-resistant. Your unlocked books persist across death, item loss, and the tome itself.
Vanilla book UI. Opening the tome shows a clean vanilla-styled book. Entries are listed as clickable links across pages. Arrow buttons (and ←/→ keys) flip pages. Clicking an entry launches the original book's native GUI.
No inventory clutter. Books live virtually in a per-player data store — not as real ItemStacks. Your inventory stays clean.
Works with everything Patchouli. Out of the box, Runic Tome recognises every Patchouli book in your pack — including mods that use custom book items (Ars Nouveau's Worn Notebook, Botania's Lexica Botania, and so on).
Tinkers' Construct ready. All six Tinkers books (Materials and You, Puny Smelting, Mighty Smelting, Fantastic Foundry, Encyclopedia of Tinkering, Tinkers' Gadgetry) are supported automatically when Tinkers is installed.
Modpack-configurable. Add any standalone book-like item to the absorption list via a simple config entry. No code, no patching.
Mod-author friendly. A small public API and IMC hook let other mods register their own guide systems.

🎮 How it works

Join a world. A Runic Tome appears in your inventory automatically.
Receive a guide book. Any way. Pickup, craft, quest reward, /give, anything. The tome absorbs it within a tick — you'll see the book disappear and a toast confirming the unlock.
Right-click the tome. A vanilla-styled book opens listing every book you've collected.
Click an entry. The original book's native UI opens. Read, flip, search — same experience as the standalone book.
Close with Done or Escape. Your tome goes back in your hotbar.

That's it. No crafting recipe, no ritual, no GUI to learn. The mod is effectively invisible until you want to read.

🔌 Compatibility

Confirmed supported guide systems:

Patchouli (and every mod that uses it — Botania, Ars Nouveau, Ice & Fire Delight, Create Addons, and many more)
Tinkers' Construct (all six books)

Add more via config: drop any item ID into extraBookItemIds in config/runictome-common.toml and Runic Tome will absorb it too. Example:

[integrations]
extraBookItemIds = [
    "immersiveengineering:manual",
    "occultism:dictionary_of_spirits",
    "farmersdelight:cookbook",
]

For mod authors: Runic Tome exposes a public GuideSystemAdapter API and an IMC registration path. If you ship a mod with its own guide system, hooking in takes about 20 lines of code. See the GitHub repository for details.

❓ FAQ

Q: Does this replace my existing books? A: It absorbs them into a virtual library on first contact. The original books vanish, but you can still open them through the tome with one click — and the original mod's native UI is preserved.

Q: What if I lose the tome? A: Your unlocked books are stored per-player, not in the tome itself. Craft a new tome (or use /give — the mod will re-give it automatically on next login if you don't have one), and your full library is still there.

Q: Does it work on dedicated servers? A: Yes. The mod is server-authoritative — all absorption decisions happen server-side and the unlocked-book list is synced to clients. Install it on both sides.

Q: Will it absorb something I don't want absorbed? A: Only items explicitly recognised by an adapter or listed in extraBookItemIds are absorbed. Vanilla books, written books, enchanted books, and item-form crafting recipes are untouched.

Q: How do I add support for a book my mod uses? A: If your mod uses Patchouli, it already works. If it uses a standalone item, add the item ID to extraBookItemIds. If you're building a new guide system, implement GuideSystemAdapter and register via IMC — see the GitHub README.

Q: What's the performance cost? A: Negligible. Pickup, craft, and container-close events absorb books the instant they arrive. A timer sweep runs once per second by default as a safety net for inventory inserts that bypass Forge events (e.g. /give). The per-player cost is a handful of HashMap lookups per second. All timings are configurable in runictome-common.toml.

📦 Installation

Install Minecraft Forge 47.3.0+ for Minecraft 1.20.1.
Download the latest Runic Tome jar from this CurseForge page.
Drop it into your mods/ folder.
Launch Minecraft. You're done.

Runic Tome has no hard dependencies. Patchouli and Tinkers' Construct are both detected at runtime if present — the mod will gracefully skip integrations that can't be loaded.

🔗 Links

GitHub: https://github.com/otectus/runic-tome
Issue tracker: https://github.com/otectus/runic-tome/issues
Architecture docs: see RUNIC-TOME-ARCHITECTURE.md in the repo

🙏 Credits

Otectus — author, code, design.
vazkii — for Patchouli, without which half this mod's value wouldn't exist.
The Forge MDK, Parchment mappings, and the Minecraft Forge community.

License: MIT. Free to use in modpacks, streams, videos, and derivative works. Attribution appreciated but not required.