"Experience your Destiny. Your Skill Tree, Built in Stone."

Stones is a progression mod built around Minecraft's vanilla XP system.

Instead of spending experience exclusively on enchanting, players discover ancient Stones throughout the world and socket magical runes into them.

Each bound Stone becomes a permanent progression hub, allowing players to customize their character without relying on a traditional RPG skill tree.

Rather than storing progression inside a menu, every build exists physically inside the Stone itself.

Features

⬛ Stones

Ancient Stones can be found throughout the Overworld.

By binding yourself to a Stone, it becomes your personal progression hub. Every Stone generates its own unique socket layout based on its world seed, allowing for different rune layouts while permanently storing your build.

🔮 Rune System

Customize your Stone using different types of runes.

• Minor Runes provide passive bonuses.
• Major Runes scale directly with your current player level.
• Milestone Runes unlock entirely new active abilities.
• Cluster Jewels combine multiple runes into a single socket to save space.

Rune power is determined by enchantments, allowing progression beyond vanilla enchantment limits.

⚔️ Active Skills

Active abilities are placed on a dedicated action bar next to the hotbar (default: R, G and V) to avoid unnecessary keybind clutter.

Runes can be swapped directly from your survival inventory, making it easy to switch between different builds.

📈 Level Progression

Minecraft's experience levels become part of your character progression.

Many runes scale directly with your current XP level, rewarding players for surviving and building experience instead of immediately spending every level.

👻 The Echo Trader

The mysterious Echo Trader exchanges XP for runes, vanilla items and Resonance Boxes.

He also offers dangerous bargains, allowing players to sacrifice maximum health in exchange for large amounts of experience. Choose carefully.

💀 Death as Progression

Death is no longer only a punishment.

Your vanilla Death Score is recorded and rewards long survival runs with Resonance Boxes after respawning. These boxes generate loot from both vanilla Minecraft and installed mods, making successful adventures feel more rewarding even after death.

⚙️ Data-Driven

Almost every aspect of Stones is data-driven.

Modpack creators can create new runes, abilities, trader offers or rebalance existing content using simple JSON datapacks—no Java code required.

Why Stones?

Minecraft's experience system was originally designed around enchanting, where levels are constantly gained and spent.

Traditional RPG skill trees don't fit naturally into that system, since every time your XP changes, your entire progression would either need to be rebuilt or permanently consume experience.

Stones approaches progression differently.

Your current XP level determines how powerful many runes become, while your character build itself remains stored inside your bound Stone. This allows XP to remain valuable without turning progression into a menu full of permanent unlocks.

Modpacks

You are free to include Stones in any CurseForge modpack.

Most progression mechanics can be adjusted through datapacks and configuration files, allowing the mod to fit a wide variety of progression styles.

⚠️ Balancing

The default rune enchantments are not intended to be perfectly balanced.

Modded Minecraft varies enormously between modpacks, making universal balancing nearly impossible. The default values are simply what felt enjoyable during our own playthrough.

Fortunately, almost everything can be configured. Modpack creators are encouraged to adjust rune values, enchantments and progression to fit their own gameplay experience.

If you have ideas for balancing, new rune concepts or general feedback, I'd genuinely love to hear them.

About the Project

Stones is a hobby project developed by a single person.

It originally started as a private mod for our own survival world and gradually grew into something worth sharing. The mechanics have been shaped over many months of playing, experimenting and refining them in actual gameplay.

While the mod is publicly available, it is still actively evolving as we continue to play with it ourselves.

Permissions

Modpacks: You are free to include Stones in any CurseForge modpack.

Re-uploading: Please do not re-upload the mod to other websites. Please link back to this CurseForge page instead.

Videos & Streams: Feel free to use Stones in YouTube videos, Twitch streams or other content.

Links

🎥 Showcase Video: Coming soon.

☕ Support the Project: If you enjoy Stones and would like to support future development, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi:

https://ko-fi.com/karlkarlmann