Shadowbound

Bind the creatures you kill as persistent Shadows, keep them in your Sea Soul, call them to fight at your side, ride them, and raise them through ranks and tiers, in a world of ruined walled cities, iron spiders and black knights.

Minecraft 1.21.1 · Fabric and NeoForge · inspired by the light novel Shadow Slave

How it works

1. Kill something. The finishing blow, by you or by one of your own Shadows, has a chance to bind the creature: 1 in 250 per kill, 1 in 50 for a boss. Vanilla creatures and modded ones alike. The chances are in the config, and a blacklist keeps out whatever you never want.
2. It is stored in your Sea Soul. Press V: an unlimited, searchable collection, with a live 3D preview of every Shadow. It survives death and restarts; rename, favourite and re-colour the outline of each one.
3. Call it. Summon it from the Sea Soul or the wheel, and hold R for the command wheel: follow, stay, move, attack, assist, guard, go wild, calm, ride, recall. The Shadow comes back as itself, with a glowing outline in the colour you chose that only you can see.
4. Grow it. Seven ranks (Dormant, Awakened, Fallen, Corrupted, Great, Cursed, Unholy), five tiers each: more health, more damage and more tempo (it walks, attacks and recovers faster) with every one.

The Sea Soul and the command wheel

• The Sea Soul (V): your whole collection in one screen, filtered by rank or name, with groups and gear.
• The command wheel (hold R): Orders, Formations, Shadows (your favourites) and Groups, a page each, one click per command, no chat commands.
• Nine formations with a live preview: hover one and your army is laid out in it, as ghosts standing in their future places in the world. Wedge, Line, Column, Phalanx, Circle, Flanks…
• Groups are saved squads (a Shadow may belong to several) with a preferred formation each; every Shadow can also be equipped with armour and a weapon.

Ride them

Any Shadow bigger than you can carry you: spiders, ravagers, iron golems, withers, most modded beasts, and the flying ones, phantoms, ghasts, the Wither and the Ender Dragon. Look where you want to go and push forward to fly; the others walk, jump and kerb-step. A rider gets the Shadow's own attacks as mounted moves. An Iron Spider climbs walls with you on its back: push into the wall and it clings, let go and it holds its height.

Summoners keep their summons

A Shadow that calls things calls them for you. A Shadow Spider Matriarch lays eggs and calls her brood; the eggs hatch into iron spiders that fight for you for a while, wear her outline colour, follow her orders (follow, stay, move, attack, guard, go wild) and vanish when she is recalled or the time runs out. Other summoners work the same way, an Evoker's vexes for one. A summon is never stored and never takes a formation slot.

Shadows grow

• Ranks and tiers change everything about a Shadow, from health and damage to speed; a level is how far it is through its rank, and it advances when it gets there.
• Shadow Vessels seal a Shadow into an item you can hand to another player; the only thing a hand-over changes is its owner.
• The Forsaken Soul Gem, dropped by the Black Knight: right-click, choose a Shadow, and it sleeps, from 30 minutes at the lowest rank to 3 hours near the top. When it wakes it has risen a whole rank.
• Bosses fight back. A boss hit by one of your Shadows turns on it; their blows hit everything their animation sweeps, yours included.

The Forgotten Shore

New places worth crossing the world for, built piece by piece so that no two are alike:

• The Dark City: a ruined city some 740 blocks across, inside a tall unbroken wall of grey polished stone that you can run right round without breaking a block, with towers you can climb, one gate and some two thousand houses, shops, inns, chapels and graveyards along streets that follow the land. At its heart:
  • the Bright Castle, white marble on its terraced hill: skulls on chains over the gate, the Towers of Dusk and Dawn, a courtyard, and a throne hall with the Bright Throne, a block you can sit on;
  • the cathedral, of dark marble, with its goddess in the choir, a crypt, a hidden cell, and the Black Knight guarding the nave;
  • the ruined library, its roof fallen in on a great spiral mosaic.
• Spider nests: tunnels and chambers of iron wire and silk, round the Spider Matriarch's cavern: cocoons, a hoard, and a boss who sleeps until you reach her.
• The Weaver's Mask: one is hidden in each city. A head piece a step above netherite, with perfect night vision and the Mantle of Lies: monsters notice you less, Endermen do not mind your gaze, and your name stays hidden.

Creatures

Carapace Scavengers, Centurions and the Carapace Demon; Corpse Eaters; Flesh Reavers; Blood Fiends and the Blood Flower Host; the Stone Saint; the Black Knight; the Spire Messenger; the Rolling Stone; and the Iron Spiders, from the Iron Spider to the Fallen Brood and the Spider Matriarch. Each has its own hand-built model and animations and its own attacks, sweeps and slams that really hit an area, and can be bound as a Shadow, ridden and fought beside. The three bosses, with their boss bars, are the Black Knight, the Spider Matriarch and the Carapace Demon.

Also in the box

Dark granite, white marble and dark marble in polished, brick, chiseled, stair, slab and wall forms; pillars that dress themselves (foot, shaft and capital, chosen by what stands above and below); crimson moss; black steel. One Shadowbound creative tab holds the lot.

Compatibility

• Minecraft 1.21.1, Java 21. One jar per loader: Fabric (needs Fabric API, nothing else) and NeoForge 21.1 (nothing else needed). Install it on the server and on every client.
• Works on modded creatures. Any living creature can be bound and summoned, whichever mod added it, and mods that bring their own riding system (Cobblemon's Pokemon, for one) are ridden through an invisible seat so theirs never throws you off. The blacklist (shadowbound:cannot_become_shadow) and the config file cover the rest.
• Everything is configurable in one commented file: acquisition chances, rank and tier tables, progression, healing, how long a Soul Gem sleep lasts.
• To try it quickly: as an operator, /shadow debug give minecraft:zombie, or raise acquisition.chance in config/shadowbound-server.properties and run /shadow config reload.

An unofficial fan project, inspired by the light novel Shadow Slave; not affiliated with the novel, its author or its publishers. Licence: MIT.