Shard's Factions

A native NeoForge territory-control mod for hardcore PvP servers, built around one idea: bases should be assaulted, not sneaked down.

⚠️ Early Release · Active Development This mod is evolving quickly. Expect rough edges, expect changes, and back up your worlds. Bug reports and feedback are welcome and genuinely shape where it goes next.

💽 Required on both client and server. Shard's Factions adds custom content (the Obelisk block), so it must be installed on the client and the server. It is not a server-only drop-in.

🚫 Not affiliated with "Factions." This is an original NeoForge mod — in no way affiliated with, derived from, or compatible with the Bukkit/Spigot Factions plugin or any of its forks. The shared word "factions" describes the genre, nothing more.

⚔️ The Core Idea

A protected claim is immune to hand tools and automated miners. Non-members cannot break or place a single block inside it. The only way through claimed terrain is explosives.

This isn't an oversight — it's the whole design. Ground troops cannot crack a fortified base; cracking it takes ordnance. Defenders dig in and fortify; attackers must mount a real siege. Every other rule in the mod serves that fantasy.

🛡️ Factions & Roles

Found a faction, invite members, and run a three-rank hierarchy — Owner, Officer, Member — with permission gates on each command. Ownership transfers but is never vacant, and a faction ends only by deliberate disband, never by emptying out.

Membership is invite-gated: in a PvP mod, an uninvited join is a spy who can build and break inside your walls.

📈 Claims, Power & Overclaiming

Claim chunks against a power budget that scales with faction size. Power is combat-driven — win fights and your faction holds its ground; lose fights and your power bleeds until your territory is overextended.

A stronger faction can then overclaim a beaten rival's land, peeling it chunk by chunk — but overclaiming is self-limiting: every chunk taken raises your own commitment, so you can't strip a rival bare without overextending yourself.

Explosives strip a base's defenses. Sustained combat dominance is what lets you take and hold the ground.

🗿 The Obelisk

A faction's protection hinges on a single placed block: the Obelisk. While it stands, your claims are protected.

It is the one block in your territory that anyone can break — by hand, tool, or explosive — but automation cannot touch, keeping its destruction a deliberate act at the climax of a raid. Destroy an enemy's Obelisk and their land falls unprotected; their online members are warned the walls are down.

Re-protecting means placing a new one — possible immediately, buying a besieged faction a desperate window to repel attackers before their land is overclaimed.

⏳ Rate-limited — acquisition gated by a configurable cooldown (default: one week).
💀 No spares — Obelisks are destroyed on the holder's death; none leak into circulation.

🟩 System Zones

Admins can carve out permanently protected areas:

Zone	Blocks	PvP	Explosions
SAFEZONE	Protected	❌ Off	💥 Immune
WARZONE	Protected	✅ Live	💥 Immune

A SAFEZONE is ideal for spawn — fully locked down. A WARZONE keeps PvP live as a buffer between the safe core and the open world. System zones never expire, never become overclaimable, and use no Obelisk.

✨ Quality-of-Life

🗺️ Chat-grid claim map (permission-gated)
📍 Action-bar territory readout as you cross borders — your land, an enemy's, or open wilderness
🚶 Autoclaim — paint territory as you walk
🏠 Faction home — teleport to your Obelisk
🛠️ Full admin suite for setting up system zones

🔑 Permissions

Uses NeoForge's native permission system — works standalone out of the box, no permission manager required. LuckPerms or any other manager plugs in automatically if present to grant or revoke nodes. No hard dependency.

🧩 Compatibility

Built for explosive-heavy modpacks. A separate companion mod, Shard's Factions — Ballistix Compat, teaches Ballistix's larger warheads to breach player claims correctly while leaving system zones immune.

⚙️ Technical Notes

Server-side authoritative for all faction data — factions, claims, roles, power, and Obelisk bindings persist across restarts. No external database required.

🔮 Planned for the Future

On the roadmap — not in the current release:

🏆 Trophy system — defeating a faction yields a trophy recording the win, deposited into a displayable faction trophy case, with public viewing of rivals' trophies.
📊 Faction stats — wins, losses, claims taken, sieges survived.
🌟 Obelisk polish — an animated, glowing Obelisk in place of the current static look.
💣 Wider explosive compatibility — claim-aware breaching for more of the pack's siege weapons, plus coverage for automated-miner mods.
⚖️ Refined siege economics — tuning around Obelisk loss and cooldowns.