"Experience your Destiny. Your Skill Tree, Built in Stone."
Make your Vanilla levels actually matter! If you’ve ever hoarded XP and felt the anxiety of "wasting" it on random enchantments, Stones introduces a uniquely rewarding progression system that turns your experience points into a persistent engine of power.
For over a decade, Minecraft’s XP mechanics have relied on a tricky design choice: because enchanting treats your levels as a temporary currency that constantly rises and falls, implementing a traditional RPG skill tree was never truly viable—it would just result in an unplayable UI clicking-marathon every time your level resets.
Stones solves this by introducing a completely unique, item-based skill tree that is entirely built by the player. Instead of navigating a static UI menu, you bind your soul to physically generated monoliths in the world and socket custom items (runes) into them. This completely bypasses the fluctuating XP problem while keeping your progression dynamic, physical, and entirely in your hands. It even repurposes the original Vanilla Death Score to award you tailored post-death loot!
🌟 Features
- 🔮 The Void Altars (Stones): Scattered across the overworld, you will find dormant black monoliths. By performing a short ritual, you can bind your soul to an altar. Each stone generates a mathematically unique socket layout (a Phyllotaxis spiral) based on its ID. Your active runes and build remain completely intact, even after you die.
- 🪨 The Rune System: Customize your altar using three different types of runes:
- Minor Runes: Provide flat, passive bonuses.
- Major Runes: Scale directly with your current player level. (The higher your Vanilla XP, the stronger you get!)
- Milestone Runes: Grant entirely new active abilities. Runes draw their power from their enchantments, which can scale well beyond standard Vanilla limits.
- Cluster Jewels: Out of space? Use Cluster Jewels to bundle up to five runes into a single socket.
- ⚔️ Clean Action Bar: To avoid hotkey clutter, Stones uses a minimalist 3-button philosophy. Your active skills are assigned to a new action bar next to your hotbar (defaulting to
R, G, and V) with clear cooldown tracking. Loadouts can be changed easily right from your survival inventory.
- 👻 The Echo Trader: An ethereal wanderer who trades runes, Vanilla items, and Resonance Boxes. His currency is your XP. He also offers massive amounts of XP in exchange for a "Blood Sacrifice" (your max HP)—though this can be instantly fatal if you overestimate your health.
- 💀 Death as a Feature: Dying is not a pure Game Over. Your Vanilla Death Score (the yellow number shown on the death screen) is placed on a server-wide leaderboard. A good run rewards you with a Resonance Box upon respawn, which pulls and mixes loot from Vanilla and other installed mods.
- ⚙️ 100% Data-Driven (For Modders): The entire engine is data-driven. Modpack makers can create new runes, abilities, or adjust trader loot tables using simple JSON files.
⚠️ State of the Mod & Known Issues
This is a massive passion project developed by a solo developer. While my friends and I have playtested this in our own private survival world for about half a year, the project is still in an early stage of development. Please keep the following in mind:
- Bugs & Glitches: You might encounter bugs. I cannot fix what I don't know about! If something breaks, please report it by opening an issue on my GitHub Issues page.
- Balancing (Work in Progress): The current skills are pretty much a Proof of Concept (POC). I picked numbers that felt right for our playthrough. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have feedback on balancing or ideas for missing rune skills!
- Mod Compatibility: We played this alongside a huge amount of other mods and I fixed several incompatibilities, but there are thousands of mods out there. You might experience some issues with certain combinations. If you find any conflicts, please let me know!
- GUI Overlaps: The custom action bar is not fully integrated with the UI of other mods yet and might overlap. I am working on a cleaner solution.
- Translations: Not all texts are fully translated yet. Updates are on the way.
- The Great Life Sacrifice: The Echo Trader might kill you. This is an intended risk/reward mechanic!
- Curse of Binding: Attempting to mine a Void Altar that contains a rune with the Curse of Binding will result in a catastrophic explosion. Check your sockets before using your pickaxe!
📜 Permissions & Credits
- Modpacks: You are free to include this mod in any CurseForge modpack. Modpack creators can freely adjust rune effects and skills via JSON datapacks to fit their intended progression.
- Re-uploading: Please do not re-upload the mod file to other websites. Just link back to this CurseForge page.
- Videos & Streams: You are absolutely welcome to use this mod in your YouTube videos or Twitch streams.
🔗 Links & Support
