Meridian Core 0.3.0 (alpha)

Every spell is reworked into its own, Xenoculture replaces Starcatchers and Echo Chambers, the Overworld sky is torn open, and every Meridian screen gets its own look. For Minecraft 26.1.2 on NeoForge.

Breaking: the Spectrograph, Catch Bowl, Catcher Lenses and Echo Chamber are gone. Worlds that had them lose those blocks. Back up worlds before updating.

Spells

Every Form and Aspect pair is now its own spell, with its own mechanics, name, look and sound. The Astrolabe and Star Loom show the name, then any modifiers ("Fireball + Seek").

• Frost slows, and freezes as a payoff: the third Ice Lance hit freezes, Frost Ring freezes all it runs over, Freezing Ray slows harder the longer it holds and leaves frost trails.
• Ember hits hardest: Fireball splashes, Inferno leaves a burning ring, Flamethrower ramps up on one target, Cinder Mantle makes your next Ember spell stronger, and Meteor Beacon drops meteors.
• Radiant chains: Star Strike jumps to three more enemies, Halo strikes back at attackers, Supernova hits harder the more enemies it marks, and Prism splits behind its first target.
• Tide hits an area and pushes and pulls: Wave Orb, Tidal Wave (8 blocks), a wide Water Cannon, Maelstrom and a Whirlpool that ends in a geyser. Knockback resistance holds bosses nearly still.
• Verdant supports: Seed Shot and Lifeline heal players they hit, Bloom, Spore Crown and Tree of Life heal players nearby, and enemies are poisoned. An enemy that dies poisoned leaves a healing spore cloud.
• Beams charge, then fire. Hold for about a second; let go early and nothing is spent. Then the beam fires for 3.5 s wherever you look.
• Effects: Meridian's own particles, drawn beams, rings, ice spikes, thorns and flowers, impact flashes and screen shake for the biggest blasts. The client config (effects: FULL, REDUCED, MINIMAL, and screenShake) turns them down.
• Sounds: every spell has its own sound events, for now built from vanilla sounds, so resource packs can replace them one by one.
• Rules kept: spells never hurt, poison, push or pull players or tamed pets; ground effects (burning rings, frost trails, splash pools, spore clouds) never place or change a block; guardians are never frozen or rooted, but slowed hard with their next attack late.
• Admins can use /meridian spells for an Astrolabe of each aspect with all six spells and a full jar of each.

Xenoculture

Resource automation you tend by hand. The Lumari's terraforming microbes, the Lithes, eat ore, and you grow them into more ore.

• Ore Blooms. Faintly glowing crusts on exposed ore faces in the Overworld, the Nether and the pack's worlds. They pulse slowly in the ore's colour, hold three samples and grow them back over a few days.
• Scraping. Hold the Sample Kit on a Bloom and let go on the brightest pulse: rough, clean (a trait +1) or perfect (+1, and one in ten a Wild Variant with a trait at 4). Rarer ores have narrower windows. A world's Lithes only take to a culture once your team has beaten its guardian.
• Cultures have four traits: Vigor (speed), Yield (nodules per cycle), Hardiness (growth away from home) and Appetite (stone eaten). The tooltip shows them as stars.
• Culture Jar and Culture Vat. Grow a culture on stone into nodules. The Jar works slowly and needs no power. The Vat is four times as fast on Stellar Flux, takes Speed and Parallel upgrades, and Starlight Feed from a Lumen Cell beside it. Cultures grow half again as fast in their home world. Metal nodules smelt to three nuggets; three gem or coal nodules craft into one.
• The Splicer breeds two cultures: turn and slide one star pattern over the other. Every pair of stars you line up gives that trait the better parent's value, sometimes one more. Stardust widens the window.
• Mutations. Ten in all, each unlocked under its own condition at the Splicer, including Steelmaw, Gildvein, Diamond Lithe, Starsteel Lithe, the Lumen Lithe (it grows starlight) and strains for Meteoric Iron and Cinder Shards. Mutation Fragments in ruins, vaults and derelicts teach your team one; the mutation notes at any Splicer show what you know as a tree.
• Tissue cultures replace the Echo Chamber: sample a creature you know well in the Bestiary and grow its common drops on raw meat or bone meal.
• Climate modules. The Heater Coil, Cryo Coil, Vacuum Seal, Brine Jacket and Spore Diffuser each fake one world's climate, so its cultures grow at full speed far from home.
• The Nodule Press (Magnitude IV) presses a nodule into three times what smelting gives.
• The Bioreactor. A 3 x 3 x 3 multiblock that grows nine cultures on shared stone, power and output. With a Hive Core, grown from Xa'Thul's Royal Pheromone, it becomes the Hive Bioreactor and grows twice as fast.
• It builds itself. With a Culture Core or Hive Core and 25 Bioreactor Casing or Glass in your inventory, placing the controller builds the whole Bioreactor block by block. Sneak to place a lone controller. Once formed, the 27 blocks become one machine with gold beams, windows onto the vials and light strips that glow while it runs; breaking any block turns it back into loose blocks.
• Bloom surges. Now and then a culture sparkles and hums for half a minute. Use its machine for five cycles at once, or the Sample Kit for a Bloom Spore, which rerolls a bad splice.
• Feral cultures. A culture left hungry for a day, or grown far from home without a module, may turn feral and release a Bloom Mite. Killing it drops a Feral Sample with one trait two higher. The Sterilizer cleans the culture. Mites can be turned off in the config.
• The Lithe Bloom, a new Orrery ritual: every culture within 16 blocks grows three times as fast for a day.
• Xenoculture has its own config file, meridian-xenoculture.toml. Strains, mutations and tissue are data-driven (data/meridian/strain, mutation, tissue), so datapacks can add more.

The Wound in the Sky

• The Overworld's night is torn. In the northern sky hangs the wound the Echo fell through: a molten gold crack with branching veins in a band of blue and violet nebula. The gold pulses, the nebula breathes and embers drip off the crack. By day it is a faint scar, and rain dims it.
• Facing it at night, the fog toward the horizon warms to amber.
• The sky now has a state (Broken, Rekindled or Hollow), saved with the world. /meridian sky reads it and /meridian sky <state> sets it. Only the Broken sky is drawn so far.

Title screen and GUI

• A title screen of its own: the Overworld night with the Wound in the Sky, twinkling stars, shooting stars and the observatory below. The painted pack logo, a lore line that changes every time, and the menu on the left.
• Every Meridian screen (machines, Bound Vault, Satchel, Star Grave, Star Loom, Socket Table, suit, telescope, Codex, trade, Orrery and more) sits on an indigo panel with a gold rim, sunk slots and framed gauges.
• Buttons are indigo with a gold rim everywhere, also in vanilla and other mods' menus.
• The logo also shows in NeoForge's mod list.

Art

• Hand-made models, textures and animations for the Selene creatures: the Silent Sentinel (aims its gauntlets and flares its hood plates while charging), the Craterspawn (only its crust shows when buried), the Moonmite and Gravelmaw (boss), a hulking basalt beast whose whole front is a maw, with its glowing core in a crater on its back. It rears up on its hind legs.
• The Bloom Mite has its own model and animations.
• Every Xenoculture block and item is hand drawn. The Splicer's view is a brass telescope lens with star glyphs. A formed Bioreactor shows a vial for every culture through the glass.

Fixes

• Star Moths now count for every player in sight, not only the nearest.
• A Glowcap Crawler no longer resets its calm when it hops while wandering, so it hides again as it should.
• A Starfall impact keeps its time.

Notes

• This is an alpha. Many blocks, items and creatures still use placeholder art.