The Idiot's Lantern

A Doctor Who fan add-on for Minecraft 1.12.2 (Forge), built to sit alongside the Dalek Mod.

It's 1953 and everyone on the street has bought a new television for the Coronation. But something is living in the sets. The Wire is a crackle of red electricity that feeds on faces, and it wants a transmitter.

Build a working 1950s television service: six national channels with round-the-clock schedules and never-ending serials made fresh for your world, your own transmitters run from a proper control desk, microwave links between your towers, a network control room, live studio cameras, roof aerials you have to aim, Betamax tapes, a portable set and a motor scooter. Then try to keep The Wire off the air, and out of the Coronation broadcast. Hunt it down in a detector van, study it in a secret laboratory of your own, and learn enough to destroy it. Or put on a Wire-proof suit, point a remote at the screen, and go through it into the hidden land of The Wire.

Unofficial fan-made mod. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the BBC. Doctor Who and The Wire belong to the BBC. All textures, models, sounds, music and programmes in this mod are original.

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Features

New in 2.1.1

• Wire Armour. A Ministry Wire-proof suit: rubberised fabric under a copper mesh. A full set makes The Wire unable to drain you, take your face or feed on you in a Feeding Lock, and keeps you well in the Wireverse; fewer pieces slow the drain. The mesh wears while it works; repair it with iron.
• The Wireverse. A new dimension behind every television screen: a plain of TV snow under a black sky with The Wire's face hanging in it, corrupted ground that jumps and tears, bits of the ordinary world it has eaten, floating islands, red lightning on lattice masts, glitches that flicker in and out, faceless wanderers, whispers, stray broadcasts, and a tape that sometimes jumps back a few seconds. Craft a Wire Dimension Remote, point it at any TV, and go through. Press it anywhere in there to come back where you went in.
• Travel between televisions. Every TV that has run since 2.1.1 has a screen standing in the Wireverse (one block there for every eight in its world, in any dimension). Stand in one and you climb out of that set, wherever it is.
• Crisper instruments. The Foundation's oscilloscope, spectrum receiver, chart recorder and speech decoder now draw their screens into their own little textures with phosphor afterglow, so they no longer flicker or tear at a distance.

New in 2.1 "Obsidian"

• The Obsidian Foundation: research The Wire. Build your own secret laboratory. Hold The Wire in a Containment Tank, measure it with an Oscilloscope, Spectrum Receiver, Chart Recorder and Speech Decoder, and run experiments from the Experiment Console: observation, test tones, programmes, starvation and capacitor discharges. Feeding Locks, Restraint Straps and Observation Beds let the Foundation go as far as it dares. Feeding a villager gets results, and the village never forgives you.
• Every world's Wire is different. Its carrier frequency, phase, waveform and speech come from your world's seed, so they have to be found by research: a digit at a time, a waveform family ruled out at a time, a phase window narrowing to the exact degree. The Dossier keeps the file.
• The inversion carrier. With the theory established and the signature known, an Inversion Carrier Generator sings The Wire's own song back at it through your transmitter and unmakes it everywhere the transmitter reaches. Get it wrong and The Wire drinks the carrier and takes your mast. Destroy it everywhere and the next Wire to appear is a new strain on a new carrier. A Jamming Transmitter holds Wire TVs back in the meantime.
• Redstone outputs, not built-in security. A Containment Alarm gives a redstone signal on breach, low integrity, surge, experiment running or Wire contained, ready for your own alarm, camera and door mods.
• The Detector Van. Drive a 1950s detector van with a direction-finding loop on the roof. Its dashboard has a map, a compass that swings to The Wire, a signal meter and a count of the sets switched on around you. Take bearings from two places, triangulate, and print a survey map. No fuel needed.
• Crowds round the set. For the big broadcasts, villagers gather round a working television to watch and cheer.
• They tried before. Very rarely, the crumbling ruins of an earlier Foundation laboratory lie half-buried in the overworld, with burnt pages that tell what happened there.

New in 2.0 "Alexandra Palace"

• Lantern Productions: serials that never end. Every serial is generated scene by scene for your world: recurring casts with their own faces and names, 24 sets from foggy streets to spaceship bridges, dialogue, shot changes, mood music, "PREVIOUSLY…" recaps and cliffhangers. Stories run several parts, then a new one begins. Seven serials (detective, space, highwaymen, a boarding house, ghosts, spies, and The Set in the Window: a television shop where the viewers' faces go missing), plus a complete one-off play every night in the Lantern Playhouse.
• Transmitter Control Desk: a real 1950s transmitter-hall panel with needle meters, lamps and switches. Switch on and off air, change channel, run at 10-150 % power, name your station, choose the programme source, and read the fault log. Valves heat up, so cool them with water or ice or they trip.
• Microwave Link Dishes and the Network Control Node: link your towers across the world. The node gives you a live network map, telemetry and remote control for every station, shared programme feeds, NETWORK JOIN (everyone takes your feed), link isolation and talkback between sites. It also keeps the site's chunks loaded.
• The Wire, as in the episode: it grows hungrier as it feeds, it travels down your microwave links, Mr Magpie sells cut-price televisions, and on Coronation Day it tries to seize your greatest transmitter and feed on the nation.

The Wire

• Wire TVs drain anyone they can see within 10 blocks. Red lightning is drawn from the victim's face into the screen until nothing is left. Creative and spectator players are always safe.
• The Wire spreads into switched-on televisions nearby and along coax cable. If lightning strikes near an aerial, the sets connected to it can turn too.
• Taking over a transmitter: if The Wire reaches one, it hijacks every channel in range with a perfect picture. Red lightning pours from the mast, and every set showing the broadcast feeds on the people watching it.
• Carry it in a Portable Television, point it at a mob and let it feed. It gets hungry if you don't.
• Trap it on a Betamax tape, up close or from a safe distance with a recorder on the line. Play it back out whenever you like.
• Faceless mode (optional): victims survive with a blank face made from their own skin. This works on players, villagers, zombies, animals and most modded mobs. Trapping The Wire gives the faces back.

Television

• Six national channels, over 90 programmes, on schedules that follow the Minecraft clock and change through the week (day 1 of a world is a Monday):

  Ch	Channel	What's on
  1	Lantern One	Keep fit, farming, gardening, the Rambling Club, cookery, the Television Handyman, the Motoring Hour, an auction, a panel game, travel, science, drama, The Beat and Inspector Cobble Investigates, talent shows, a sci-fi serial, ballroom, the Dance Band Show, concerts, Tonight's Interview, the Lantern Lecture, and Evensong on Sundays. Test card overnight.
  2	Lantern Two	Children's and family: stories and nursery rhymes, cartoons, puppets and a ventriloquist, the zoo and the Pony Club, drawing and Junior Science, the circus and the Model Railway Club, a magician and a treasure hunt, an adventure serial, Space Cadets, and westerns.
  10	Newsreel	Rolling news, the weather every hour, the Lantern Gazette newsreel, the Emerald Exchange market prices, football results by teleprinter, farming, Parliament Report, the Sports Round-Up and the Shipping Forecast.
  11	Picture Palace	Films: slapstick silents, a railway romance, pirates, a horror picture, a musical, a war picture, a film noir, trailers, intermissions, and the serial omnibus.
  12	Lantern Sport	Cricket, racing, motor racing, athletics, tennis, boxing, wrestling, football, snooker, darts, the Boat Race, six-day cycling, show jumping and classified results. Football on Saturdays.
  13	Schools / Nightlight	Schools lessons by day (arithmetic, geography, science, history, French) with the interval clock between them. After dark it becomes Nightlight, the overnight service: Starwatch, jazz, ghost stories, the late film, Poetry at Midnight, the midnight news, the Shipping Forecast, the Sleep Service, Lantern Text (the teletext-style news, weather and listings pages) and the dawn chorus. Something else sometimes gets on the air at 3 a.m.

• Every programme has several scenes and its own soundtrack, played through a period TV speaker. All the music is original, and the presenters speak an indistinct synthetic babble.

• Proper presentation: each programme opens with a title card showing the episode or "Repeat", and a "Next" caption runs before it ends. The serial moves on one episode a night, and the next morning's repeat and the weekly omnibus catch you up.

• The weather forecast is real. It uses the world's own weather timers to tell you when rain or storms will actually start or clear over the next twelve hours. The weather map is drawn from the country around you, with temperatures in °C from the real biomes. Cold districts get snow, deserts stay dry, and Starwatch shows the moon's real phase.

• The news is live. It reads out the day, the time, the weather, and how many faces are missing.

• Signal matters. Distance, aerial height and aim, how many aerials are stacked, and the weather all change the picture. It goes from crisp, to snowy, to rolling, to pure static. Thunderstorms break the picture up and flash every set to snow when lightning strikes.

• A set's own rabbit ears get a weak picture on their own. A roof aerial does much better.

Broadcasting

• Build your own transmitter on channels 3-9. Load a book to run a caption news service, or a recorded tape.
• Relay the national channels: cycle a transmitter round to 1, 2 or 10-13 and it becomes a relay that boosts that national channel around it. Good for basements, valleys and far-flung bases.
• Yagis are transmit aerials too: put Yagi antennas on a transmitter's coax and they radiate its signal, beamed the way they point, with the power shared between them.
• Lattice masts extend a transmitter's range. They're modelled on the great masts of 1930s broadcasting palaces.
• Live studio:
  • Studio Cameras show the real scene in front of them, live on air. Tilt and change lens on each one.
  • The Vision Mixer cuts between cameras and adds captions from a book.
  • The Transmit Switch puts the studio on and off air. An ON AIR sign lights up while you're live.
  • Dress the set with Studio Lamps, Microphones and a Newsreader's Desk.
• Betamax Recorder: record any programme off-air, play tapes to the TVs on its cable, and turn any set on the line into a studio monitor.

Run your own station

• Network Monitor: a massive master-control screen for the studio. Place the blocks touching each other (placing one against another copies its facing) and they join into one wall, up to 20 x 12, that shows every channel on the air, live: your own transmitters (with studio cameras, tapes and captions), the national services, and The Wire when it takes over. Each picture has a tally light, audio meters, a caption and a LIVE / VT / TXT badge, and a ticker scrolls along the bottom with what's on, the weather and any alerts. The whole wall flashes red when the Wire is on the air. Right-click a picture to fill the wall with that channel, right-click again to go back to the grid, and sneak-right-click to switch between ALL / STUDIO / NATIONAL / OFF. It needs no cable.
• Coax Router: a patch-bay block. Of its six faces exactly two are joined, and signal that enters one leaves by the other; the other four are dead. Click a joined face to step its partner round the other five faces, or click a dead face to join it to the face opposite. Put one at a junction to choose which branch a line takes, or chain several into a patch bay. Only the two joined faces show a cable arm.
• Coax Switch: a length of coax with a knife switch in it. Right-click to cut or restore the line, or feed it redstone to cut it automatically. Isolate a studio, take a set off its aerial, or switch a transmitter's Yagis in and out. Everything on the line re-tunes at once.
• Signal Analyser: connect it to a coax line and right-click for a full engineering report: signal-to-noise, picture grade (1-5), fade margin, noise floor, which way each aerial points and how many degrees to turn it, the setup of any transmitter on the line (range, mast, Yagis and their power shares), co-channel interference, and a survey of the whole band. Sneak-click to tune it to another channel. Its front lamp shows quality at a glance and a comparator reads it as a 0-15 redstone signal, so you can build alarms for a relay that has dropped out.
• Mast Beacon: the flashing red aviation warning lamp for the top of your mast.

Running a station

• Sharper cameras. Studio cameras are traced at up to four times the old resolution (visuals.cameraResolution), and the picture is interlaced like a 405-line set, so a sharp picture costs about what the old one did. Five lenses now, from a very wide angle to a telephoto, and cameras can be panned with the pan bar (a stick).
• A real vision mixer. Right-click the mixer holding a stick to choose cut, mix or wipe; the desk then mixes or wipes between cameras. Its sources are the cameras, a Betamax Recorder playing a tape (a VT insert) and the Studio Clock. A redstone pulse into the mixer cuts to the next source, so a redstone clock runs a multi-camera show on its own.
• Studio Clock: a wall clock the mixer can cut to (the countdown before a programme) that also puts the time on the camera picture. It lights while the studio is live.
• Caption Generator: load a book and choose a style: a strap across the bottom, a name super (the book's title, as a lower third), a scrolling ticker, or full-screen slides. The mixer uses it in place of its own book.
• Continuity Desk: the heart of a self-running channel. Right-click it with up to nine recorded tapes and books to build a running order. It plays them in turn, each for half an hour on the Minecraft clock (configurable), with a station ident between them, and the channel gets proper title cards and "NEXT" captions like the national services. Name the station with a name tag; a redstone pulse skips to the next item.
• Off-air relays. A transmitter with nothing of its own to show rebroadcasts whatever a television on its cable is receiving. Put a set with a good aerial on a transmitter's coax, tune it to a distant station, and the transmitter carries that station on: chain relays across the country. (Loops are refused.)
• What a transmitter puts out, in order: The Wire if it has it, a live studio, a Continuity Desk, the book or tape loaded in it, an off-air relay, and otherwise its test card.

Keeping The Wire out

• Earthing Rod: lightning that strikes within 12 blocks of a rod (counterplay.earthingRadius) is carried to ground, so it never turns the sets on the roof into Wire TVs.
• Faraday Cage: televisions within 6 blocks (counterplay.faradayRadius) cannot be infected, however The Wire tries to spread. A Coax Switch still isolates a set from a Wire TV on its cable.
• Wire storms: every 11th night (counterplay.wireStormEvery, never on Coronation Day) thunder rolls in, the lightning starts, and The Wire is as ravenous as on Coronation Day. Cleansing a set the storm infected drops experience (once per set: Wire you release from a tape or a portable set pays nothing). Players online at dawn get an advancement. Storms respect /gamerule doWeatherCycle false: The Wire still runs riot, but the sky stays as it is.
• Redstone: a comparator beside a Broadcast Transmitter reads 15 while The Wire has it, even with the transmitter switched off the air, so it is safe to wire a comparator back to shut it down. One beside a Network Monitor reads 15 while The Wire is on the air anywhere in the dimension.
• Daleks are immune (integration.daleksImmune): Dalek Mod entities have no faces to eat. This is matched by entity id, so the Dalek Mod isn't required.
• Advancements: a tab of 14, from your first television to a trapped Wire, a Coronation Day and a Wire storm.
• Engineer's Handbook: right-click for an illustrated in-game manual: twelve chapters with a contents page, chapter tabs and clickable cross-references, technical diagrams (masts and Yagis, microwave paths, cooling layouts, the studio chain, The Wire's hunger), worked examples, and every recipe drawn as a real crafting grid with item icons.
• Performance:
  • Televisions nobody is near re-tune and hunt for victims far less often (performance.idleRange), spread out so they never all wake on the same tick.
  • Tile updates send only the fields that changed (deltaTileSync), and only to players who can see the chunk.
  • Sets on one cable share their network scan (coaxCacheTicks); a change only clears the networks it touches.
  • Sets that hunt in the same 32-block cell at the same moment share one victim search (sharedVictimScan).
  • Signal ray-traces are cached and only thrown away when a block on their path changes.
  • Earthing Rods and Faraday Cages are kept in a list per world, so a lightning strike checks a handful of blocks instead of tens of thousands.
  • Studio cameras trace their picture without creating garbage, and walls of monitors no longer force every camera to full speed or re-upload pictures nobody is looking at.
• Network Monitor ticker: a station with a Continuity Desk now announces what is coming up next, with its time.
• JEI: build with -PwithJei for info pages on the mod's blocks and items (recipes already show in JEI).

More villages, wired for television

• Villages now generate roughly seven times as often (configurable). Every ordinary house has a television standing in a corner, coax cable running up through the roof, and a Yagi aerial on top. Sets are tuned to one of the national channels, so wandering into a village at dusk means somebody's watching the programme.
• Only newly generated chunks get the extra villages: explore somewhere new, or start a new world. Terrain you've already visited keeps the villages it had.
• Big modpacks: if another mod swaps in its own village generator, The Idiot's Lantern keeps that mod's villages and just spaces them out as configured (their houses don't get the TV kit). logs/latest.log says which generator is in use and what the spacing was set to; search it for "Village spacing" or "village generator".

The street party

• Coronation Day comes every 8th day: the Royal Procession and street-party specials on both channels, bunting, fireworks, and a ravenous Wire.
• The TV Repairman villager: a new village trader, in the spirit of the episode's cut-price TV shop. Put up a Magpie Electricals sign over his door.
• A Motor Scooter to arrive in style.
• A Signal Strength Meter with a live map and compass. It shows channel strengths, points you towards transmitters, and warns of Wire activity nearby.

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Running a network (2.0)

The Transmitter Control Desk

Run coax from the desk to one or more transmitters (or place it beside one) and right-click it. If several transmitters share the cable, step between them with the arrows at the top right.

• STATUS: four meters (Forward Power, Valve Temperature, Aerial Match/VSWR, Signal ERP) and lamps for ON AIR, TRIP, WIRE, LINK, OVERHEAT and MISMATCH. The screen shows station, channel, what's showing, source, range, mast, aerials, viewers, uptime and power. If The Wire gets onto your carrier it flashes "*** WIRE ON CARRIER ***".
• CONTROL: ON AIR / OFF AIR, a channel stepper (brown keys 3-9 carry your own programme; blue keys relay the national channels), a power fader from 10 to 150 %, a station-name box and RESET. Redstone into the transmitter still holds it off the air.
• PROGRAMME: AUTO (studio, then Continuity Desk, then the book or tape in the slot, then an off-air relay, then the test card), or force STUDIO, CONTINUITY, SLOT, RELAY, LINK, SERIAL, TEST CARD, INTERLUDE (the Windmill, the Waves or the Spinning Wheel) or CAPTION ("Normal service will be resumed…"). If the chosen source has nothing, your test card goes out instead.
• LOG: every switch, trip, surge, link loss, Wire alarm and operator command, with the time and the operator's name.

Valves, cooling and trips. At full power with nothing around it a transmitter settles at about 90 °C. Above 120 °C it trips off the air, and it stays off until the valves cool below 60 °C and someone presses RESET. Overdrive heats fast: about 100 s to a trip at 120 % power and 20 s at 150 %. Water, ice, packed ice and snow touching the cabinet cool it; four water blocks let you run flat out. Range grows only with the fourth root of the power, but heat grows with its square. A transmitter with no mast and no aerials is badly mismatched (VSWR 3:1), and the reflected power heats the valves. Lightning nearby trips an unearthed transmitter; put an Earthing Rod in range.

Lantern Productions

The national channels carry serials made for your world, one new part every day:

Serial	Channel and time
The Fog Street Mysteries (detective)	Lantern One, 8 pm
Number Nine, Paradise Row (boarding house)	Lantern One, lunchtime
Lantern Playhouse (a complete play)	Lantern One, 10:30 pm nightly
Journey Beyond the Moon (space)	Lantern Two, 6 pm, repeated next morning
The King's Highway (highwaymen)	Lantern Two, 2 pm
Operation Nightingale (spies)	Picture Palace, 5:20 pm
Shadows at Midnight (ghost story)	Nightlight, 11:10 pm
The Set in the Window (if you dare)	Nightlight, 1:40 am

On your own channel: set a Control Desk's source to SERIAL and pick a serial. Your transmitter gets its own run of it, with stories nobody else will see. Use the part buttons to move on, or NEW STORY to start the next tale. Write your own: title a written book SERIAL: Your Title. On its pages write CAST: Inspector Plum, Miss Daisy, Mrs Bloggs, Lord Grimwood (hero, companion, regular, then villains), PLACE: Little Snoring and optionally GENRE: ghost, then put it in the transmitter. The same book always makes the same serial. Betamax: record a serial and the tape keeps that exact episode. PLAY starts it from the opening titles.

Microwave links

Every site has a Network Control Node: a rack cabinet on the same coax as the site's transmitters, studio, continuity desk, recorders and dishes. It names the site (rename it on the TALKBACK tab, or name the item in an anvil) and keeps the site's chunks loaded.

Building a link: put a Microwave Link Dish on each site's coax, high up with a clear view. A dish faces the way you look when you place it; sneak-right-click it to turn it a quarter. Two dishes link when each lies within 12° of the other's facing and they are within 384 blocks (a little further from high ground). Right-click a dish to see its partner, distance, bearing and margin, or why it has none. Hills and buildings eat the margin, rain costs about 4 dB and thunderstorms 10 dB. For a site off at an angle, build a relay site: a node with two dishes on its coax.

The node's panel:

• MAP: every site, north up, links coloured by margin, The Wire flashing red.
• STATIONS: every transmitter on the network with live telemetry and remote controls (on/off air, channel, power, source, RESET, TAKE OUR FEED).
• FEED: what your site offers: OFF, AUTO, a chosen transmitter, STUDIO, CONTINUITY or TAPE. NETWORK JOIN puts every other station on your feed (the national hook-up); OPT OUT hands them back.
• LINKS: each dish's partner, distance, bearing, margin, terrain loss and rain fade, with ISOLATE / RESTORE.
• TALKBACK: send a message to another site's control room, and read the event log.

The Wire in 2.0

• Hunger: every face The Wire takes makes it hungrier: HUNGRY at 5, RAVENOUS at 20, ASCENDANT at 50. The hungrier it is, the faster it drains, the faster it spreads and the louder its masts crackle. It fades a little each day it goes unfed, and trapping it knocks it back hard.
• Down the links: a station taking a feed with The Wire on it broadcasts The Wire. About once a minute a site with a possessed transmitter may send it down a link into the next site, more often the hungrier it is. ISOLATE the link, or put a Faraday Cage within 3 blocks of the receiving dish.
• The Coronation: at half past ten on Coronation Day, if The Wire is about, it seizes your greatest transmitter (the one that reaches furthest), its reach grows by half, and every set on channel 1 or 2 within it shows The Wire instead of the procession. Climb the mast and trap it: everyone gets their face back and you earn Long Live the Queen!
• Magpie Electricals: the TV Repairman sells Cut-price Televisions. They work like any set for a day or three; then one night, while someone is watching, The Wire shows its face. (Villagers already at level 2 or above in an older world won't offer them; new and levelling villagers will.)
• Lightning within 16 blocks of a transmitter or its mast trips it unless an Earthing Rod is near.

The Obsidian Foundation (2.1)

The Obsidian Foundation studies The Wire so that one day it can be destroyed. You build the laboratory; the mod supplies the equipment.

The Containment Tank

A two-block glass vessel. Load it by using a Wire tape on it (or a handheld set with The Wire in it); a blank tape takes The Wire out again.

• Its containment field needs a redstone signal. Unpowered, it loses integrity quickly.
• An Earthing Rod within 12 blocks and a Faraday Cage within 6 steady it. An agitated, hungry Wire wears it down, and lightning nearby jolts it.
• A comparator against either half reads its integrity (1-15).
• At 0 % it breaches: The Wire is loose in your laboratory, hunting like a Wire TV and spreading down the coax until someone traps it on a blank tape.

Instruments and experiments

Put the instruments anywhere on the tank's coax. Every 20 seconds (foundation.sampleTicks) the tank is sampled.

• Oscilloscope: the waveform, then the phase. Spectrum Receiver: the carrier frequency.
• Chart Recorder: records every sample on its paper and prints a chart strip per sheet. No paper, no research.
• Speech Decoder: what The Wire says, heard through a faceless subject on an Observation Bed within 8 blocks.

On the Experiment Console, choose OBSERVE (steady, safe), TEST TONES (three times the spectral data; it hates them), PROGRAMMES (behaviour and a little speech; it calms down), STARVATION (more behaviour data as it gets agitated, at a risk to the tank) or DISCHARGE (arm the capacitors, then press DISCHARGE or pulse the console with redstone: a burst of data and a jolt).

Subjects

Strap a creature with Restraint Straps (right-click it; it follows you) and right-click a Feeding Lock to put it inside. A lock works set against the tank or anywhere on the tank's coax, however far down the cable, and there is no limit to how many a tank can have. Right-click the lock to switch between FEED (The Wire takes everything) and SAMPLE (the subject is left faceless and alive). Animals give a little data, monsters more, villagers and players the most. Feeding a villager makes the village distrust you for days: no trades, no talk, and its reputation (and its golems) turns against you. Player and villager experiments can each be switched off in the config.

What research reveals

• Carrier: a digit at a time, at 40, 90, 160, 250 and 360 spectral points.
• Waveform: one wrong family ruled out every 20 points; identified at 120.
• Phase: once the waveform is known, the window narrows from ±90° to the exact degree.
• Behaviour: feeding pattern (60), jamming pattern (150), inversion theory (250).
• Speech: a fragment every 30 linguistic points; all eight extend the inversion carrier's reach by half.

Read it all in the Dossier. Every copy reads the same file, and the Foundation announces each finding to anyone within 48 blocks of the laboratory.

Destroying The Wire

• Jamming Transmitter: once the jamming pattern is known, a powered jammer stops every Wire TV within 16 blocks from feeding, spreading or turning a Magpie set. A possessed transmitter is too strong to jam.
• Inversion Carrier Generator: put it on a transmitter's coax, dial in the five carrier digits, the phase and the waveform, run the transmitter on the air at 100 % power or more, turn the key and press FIRE. After 30 seconds on the air, everything within the transmitter's reach is cleansed: Wire TVs become ordinary sets, possessed masts are freed, Wire in tanks and handheld sets burns out, every face returns and The Wire's hunger falls to nothing.
• Get it wrong and The Wire drinks the carrier: it grows hungrier and possesses the transmitter you fired from. The Dossier logs which part was wrong.
• New strains: if nothing of The Wire survives anywhere loaded, the next Wire to appear (a placed Wire TV, a tape released, a lightning strike, a Magpie set) is a new strain on a new carrier and phase. Its waveform and speech stay the same, so that research carries over. Betamax tapes and the portable set trap The Wire as they always did.

Containment Alarm

A relay box on the tank's coax with a redstone output (all sides, and a comparator) for BREACH, LOW INTEGRITY, SURGE, EXPERIMENT RUNNING, WIRE CONTAINED or ANY ALARM (right-click to choose). It never powers the tank it watches. Wire it to your own alarms, cameras and doors.

The Detector Van

Right-click to get in: two seats, with the driver on the right. W/S drive and brake, A/D steer. Hit it four times (or once while sneaking) to pick it up. The dashboard shows a map with your bearings, a compass whose needle swings to the loudest trace of The Wire in range, a signal meter, a count of sets switched on nearby and how well the receiver is tuned.

• B takes a bearing, G clears them, N prints a survey map (it costs a sheet of paper), H sounds the horn. The keys can be rebound under Controls.
• Possessed transmitters are loudest, then Wire TVs and breached tanks. A contained tank is faint, and so is a handheld set.
• Each digit of the carrier the Foundation has measured sharpens the needle and adds range: 96 blocks at first, 256 with all five.

Crowds and ruins

• During the big broadcasts (the Coronation, the football, a serial's new episode, a live studio), villagers within 24 blocks crowd round a working set, up to 8 at a time. The household earns the village's goodwill. A crowded room is also a feast for The Wire.
• About one chunk in 900 holds the ruin of an earlier Foundation laboratory: a sunken bunker of crumbling masonry and obsidian with a breached tank, scorched instruments and a filing chest of burnt pages. The masonry very occasionally crumbles and falls. The ruined equipment is decoration only.

The Wireverse (2.1.1)

Wire Armour

Craft the Wire Hood, Jacket, Waders and Boots from leather, iron and coax (the hood takes a glass pane for its visor). They protect like iron and repair with iron at an anvil.

• A full set (wireArmour.piecesForImmunity, 4 by default): The Wire can't drain you or take your face, a Feeding Lock won't hold you, the Wireverse doesn't wear on you, and its lightning does nothing.
• Fewer pieces: each one makes a drain take three-quarters as long again (slowdownPerPiece).
• The mesh wears a point per piece per second while The Wire feeds on you, and crackles (and wears a little) when a full set stands near a live Wire. Earn Wire-Proof by wearing the set.

The Wire Dimension Remote

A bakelite remote with a Wire tape wired in. Point it at any television (on or off, Wire TV or not) and press: you go through the screen into the Wireverse, arriving by that set's screen. In the Wireverse, press it anywhere to come back out where you went in. The remote has a short cooldown either way.

The hidden land of The Wire

The Wireverse is the inside of every television at once. The ground is television snow over dead signal, corrupted the way a broken picture is: square macroblocks of it jump up and down or smear flat, bands shear sideways, raster lines of light run across it every sixteen blocks, rifts tear through it, and patches of the ordinary world it has eaten lie about (grass, bricks, bookshelves, even front rooms with the set and the armchairs). Floating islands of static hang high above. Lattice masts carry a red relay node for the lightning. Dead televisions stand about, hissing (decoration: they lead nowhere).

• Red lightning strikes near you now and then (wireverse.lightningTicks), going for the masts more often than not; a strike within 2.5 blocks hurts unless you are in armour, and sometimes corrupts the ground into a glitch block.
• Glitch blocks flicker out of existence and back (never around somebody standing in them), so what was floor may not be.
• The faceless wander near you: the people The Wire took. They fade when nobody is about.
• Whispers in red on your screen, some of them fragments of what the Foundation's decoders hear, and stray broadcasts drifting by, slowed and wrong.
• The tape jumps: every few minutes you may find yourself a few seconds back where you were (The Tape Jumped).
• The picture tears and breaks into snow now and then (wireverse.screenGlitches, client-side).

Exposure. Without a full set of Wire Armour the Wireverse wears on you: after safeSeconds (60) you feel sick and hear it whisper, after twice that you slow, after three times that The Wire feeds on you from the dark every ten seconds. Each piece of armour slows the count. A meter at the bottom left shows it. It wears off outside.

Travel between televisions

Every television that has been running since 2.1.1 (in any dimension) has a screen standing in the Wireverse at its position divided by wireverse.scale (8, like the Nether), on the ground, with a beam of light over it: cyan for an ordinary set, red for a Wire TV. Each is labelled with the world and coordinates it leads to. Stand in one for screenTicks (16) and you climb out of that set, in front of its screen, in whatever world it stands. Go in through your own set and come out of a friend's across the map, or out of a set in the Nether (Channel Hopping, Interdimensional Television). A set that has been broken since shows a dark screen when you touch it.

Servers can keep strangers out of private sets with wireverse.exitAnywhere=false (players can only climb back out of the set they came in by) and hide the labels with screenLabels=false. The Wireverse's dimension id is 1953; change wireverse.dimensionId if another mod already uses it (the log says so at start-up), or switch it off with wireverse.enabled=false.

Getting started

1. Craft a Television and a Yagi TV Antenna. Put the antenna on the roof with nothing above it, and run Coax Cable from the antenna to the TV.
2. Right-click the TV to change channel. Sneak-right-click switches it on or off. The national channels (1, 2 and 10-13) are on the air everywhere.
3. Hold a Signal Strength Meter to see how each channel comes in where you stand.

Aiming aerials

Radio works as a proper link budget in decibels, and the meter shows your signal-to-noise in dB (30 dB is a perfect picture). A transmitter's range is where a good roof aerial still gets a watchable picture.

• Height is range: signal falls away much faster once the path is longer than the aerials' heights allow, so tall masts and roof aerials reach far further than low ones.
• Obstruction: hills, buildings and trees between an aerial and a transmitter weaken the signal. Water and leaves cost less than solid blocks.
• Aim: a Yagi hears about 15 dB less from behind or the side than from the front.
• More aerials: Yagis stacked on one mast add gain, and several on one coax line add their power together, even when pointed at different transmitters. A set's own rabbit ears help only a little.
• Coax loses a little signal over long runs. Keep cable short and the aerial near the set.
• Storms raise the noise; two different programmes on one channel spoil each other; a relay only ever helps.
• Sneak-click order on a transmitter: 3-13, then 1 and 2.

A Yagi antenna points the way you're facing when you place it. For your own transmitters (channels 3-9), point it at the transmitter: a side-on aerial loses most of the signal. National channels come from everywhere, so aim doesn't matter for them. Higher aerials get a better picture, and every extra aerial or lattice section stacked on the mast helps a little more. The top of the mast has to see the sky. The Band III channels (10-13) are weaker than 1 and 2, so a set's own rabbit ears struggle with them: put up a roof aerial.

Your own channel

1. Place a Broadcast Transmitter and stack Lattice Mast sections (or iron bars) on top. Each section adds 12 blocks of range to the base 160.
2. Sneak-right-click it empty-handed to choose a channel (3-9).
3. Give it something to show:
   • Right-click with a Book & Quill or a Written Book: its pages go out as captions, and the book's title becomes the channel name.
   • Right-click with a recorded Betamax tape: it plays the tape.
   • Or connect a studio (below).
4. A redstone signal into the transmitter takes it off the air.

Building a studio

Connect everything with Coax Cable: cameras, the Vision Mixer, a Transmit Switch and your Transmitter. Signals only travel along cable, so every device must touch a cable block (devices don't pass the signal through each other).

1. Build a transmitter with a channel chosen (see above). It doesn't need a book or tape.
2. Run one coax line from it to a Vision Mixer, a Transmit Switch and one or more Studio Cameras.
3. Face each camera at your set, and light the set with Studio Lamps.
4. Right-click the Transmit Switch to go ON AIR. The camera's red tally and any ON AIR sign light up.
5. Tune a television (anywhere within range, with an aerial aimed at the transmitter) to that channel.

• Studio Camera: it looks the way you're facing when you place it. Right-click to tilt it, sneak-right-click to change lens (very wide, wide, normal, close-up, telephoto). Holding a stick, right-click pans it right and sneak-right-click pans it left. The red tally light shows which camera is live.
• Vision Mixer: right-click to cut to the next source and sneak-right-click to cut back. Right-click holding a stick to choose cut, mix or wipe. Right-click with a book to add captions; with a book loaded, sneak-right-click takes it out. A redstone pulse cuts to the next source.
• Studio Clock and Caption Generator: see Running a station above. Both go on the studio's coax.
• Transmit Switch: right-click for ON AIR / OFF AIR. It gives out a redstone signal while live, and a redstone signal can switch it on.
• ON AIR Sign: lights up whenever the studio on its cable is live.
• Studio monitor: any TV on the studio cable tuned to channel 0 (AV) shows the Vision Mixer's output, even in rehearsal.
• Light your set. The picture shows the real light levels, so use Studio Lamps.

The camera picture is a live black-and-white view of the world, drawn by your own game. Anyone watching needs to be close enough for the studio to be loaded; if it isn't, they see "Outside Broadcast".

Betamax Recorder

Load a tape (right-click with it) and give the recorder a redstone pulse:

Tape loaded	What a pulse does
Blank, and The Wire is on the line	Traps The Wire from every Wire TV and possessed transmitter on the cable. If a set on the cable is watching The Wire's broadcast, it traps The Wire from that distant transmitter too.
Blank	Records whatever a TV on the cable is showing.
Recorded	Plays or stops the tape. TVs on the cable switch to AV.
The Wire	Releases it into the TVs on the cable, or into a transmitter, which puts it on the air.

The Wire

• Getting a Wire TV: craft one, or wait for lightning to strike near an aerial.
• Portable Television: sneak-right-click a Wire TV (or right-click a possessed transmitter) to catch The Wire in it. Hold right-click to feed it on whatever you point at. Sneak-right-click a TV to let The Wire out, or a transmitter to put it on the air.
• Trapping it: right-click a Wire TV or a possessed transmitter with a blank Betamax tape, or use a recorder from a safe distance.
• Breaking a Wire TV drops a plain television, and The Wire jumps into the nearest switched-on set.

---

Recipes

Item	Recipe (top row / middle row / bottom row)
Television	3 Planks / Plank, Glass Pane, Plank / Button, Redstone, Button
Wire TV	Television in the centre, Eyes of Ender on the four sides, Redstone Blocks in the corners
Coax Cable ×16	3 Black Wool / Iron Ingot, Redstone, Iron Ingot / 3 Black Wool
Yagi TV Antenna ×2	3 Iron Bars / -, Iron Ingot, - / 3 Iron Bars
Lattice Mast ×4	Iron Ingot, -, Iron Ingot / -, Iron Bars, - / Iron Ingot, -, Iron Ingot
Broadcast Transmitter	Iron Ingot, Yagi Antenna, Iron Ingot / Redstone Block, Diamond, Redstone Block / Iron Ingot, Iron Block, Iron Ingot
Betamax Recorder	3 Iron Ingots / Button, Redstone, Button / Iron Ingot, Comparator, Iron Ingot
Betamax Tape ×2	3 Iron Nuggets / String, Ink Sac, String / 3 Iron Nuggets
Portable Television	-, String, - / Plank, Glass Pane, Plank / Plank, Redstone, Plank
Signal Strength Meter	-, Iron Bars, - / Iron Ingot, Glass Pane, Iron Ingot / Iron Ingot, Comparator, Iron Ingot
Studio Camera	Iron Ingot, Glass Pane, Iron Ingot / Iron Ingot, Redstone, Iron Ingot / -, Iron Ingot, -
Vision Mixer	Glass Pane, Button, Glass Pane / Redstone, Comparator, Redstone / 3 Iron Ingots
Transmit Switch	-, Lever, - / Iron Ingot, Redstone Block, Iron Ingot / 3 Iron Ingots
ON AIR Sign ×2	3 Glass Panes / Red Dye, Redstone Torch, Red Dye / 3 Glass Panes
Studio Lamp ×2	3 Iron Ingots / Iron Ingot, Glowstone, Iron Ingot / -, Iron Ingot, -
Studio Microphone ×2	-, Iron Nugget, - / -, Iron Ingot, - / -, Stone Pressure Plate, -
Newsreader's Desk ×2	3 Planks / Plank, -, Plank
Magpie Electricals Sign ×2	3 Planks / Plank, Yellow Dye, Plank
Coronation Bunting ×8	3 String / Red Wool, White Wool, Blue Wool
Network Monitor ×2	Iron Ingot, Glass Pane, Iron Ingot / Redstone, Television, Redstone / 3 Iron Ingots
Coax Switch ×2	-, Lever, - / Coax Cable, Redstone, Coax Cable / -, Iron Ingot, -
Coax Router	Coax Cable, Redstone, Coax Cable / -, Lever, - / -, Coax Cable, -
Signal Analyser	Iron Ingot, Iron Bars, Iron Ingot / Glass Pane, Signal Strength Meter, Glass Pane / Iron Ingot, Comparator, Iron Ingot
Mast Beacon ×2	-, Redstone Torch, - / Red Glass Pane, Redstone, Red Glass Pane / 3 Iron Ingots
Motor Scooter	-, -, Iron Ingot / Lime Wool, Redstone, Lime Wool / Black Wool, -, Black Wool
Studio Clock ×2	-, Iron Ingot, - / Glass Pane, Clock, Glass Pane / -, Iron Ingot, -
Caption Generator	3 Buttons / Iron Ingot, Paper, Iron Ingot / 3 Iron Ingots
Continuity Desk	Betamax Tape, Redstone, Betamax Tape / 3 Planks / Plank, -, Plank
Earthing Rod	Iron Ingot / Iron Ingot / Coax Cable
Faraday Cage	3 Iron Bars / Iron Bars, Coax Cable, Iron Bars / 3 Iron Bars
Engineer's Handbook	Book and Coax Cable (shapeless)
Transmitter Control Desk	Glass Pane, Signal Meter, Glass Pane / Redstone, Comparator, Redstone / Iron Ingot, Coax Cable, Iron Ingot
Microwave Link Dish	3 Iron Ingots / Iron Bars, Yagi Antenna, Iron Bars / -, Iron Bars, -
Network Control Node	Iron Ingot, Signal Meter, Iron Ingot / Redstone, Comparator, Redstone / Iron Ingot, Clock, Iron Ingot
Containment Tank	Iron Ingot, Faraday Cage, Iron Ingot / Glass, -, Glass / Obsidian, Coax Cable, Obsidian
Experiment Console	Obsidian, Signal Meter, Obsidian / Redstone, Comparator, Redstone / Iron Ingot, Coax Cable, Iron Ingot
Oscilloscope	Iron Ingot, Glass Pane, Iron Ingot / Redstone, Quartz, Redstone / Iron Ingot, Coax Cable, Iron Ingot
Spectrum Receiver	Iron Ingot, Glass Pane, Iron Ingot / Redstone, Yagi Antenna, Redstone / Iron Ingot, Coax Cable, Iron Ingot
Chart Recorder	Iron Ingot, Paper, Iron Ingot / Redstone, Clock, Redstone / Iron Ingot, Coax Cable, Iron Ingot
Speech Decoder	Iron Ingot, Paper, Iron Ingot / Button, Repeater, Button / Iron Ingot, Coax Cable, Iron Ingot
Feeding Lock	3 Iron Bars / Iron Bars, -, Iron Bars / Iron Ingot, Obsidian, Iron Ingot
Observation Bed	3 Leather / 3 Iron Ingots / Iron Ingot, -, Iron Ingot
Containment Alarm	-, Redstone Lamp, - / Iron Ingot, Comparator, Iron Ingot / Iron Ingot, Coax Cable, Iron Ingot
Restraint Straps	3 Leather, String and Iron Ingot (shapeless)
Dossier	Book, Paper, Ink Sac and Obsidian (shapeless)
Jamming Transmitter	Yagi Antenna, -, Yagi Antenna / Obsidian, Redstone Block, Obsidian / Iron Ingot, Faraday Cage, Iron Ingot
Inversion Carrier Generator	Obsidian, Eye of Ender, Obsidian / Diamond, Signal Meter, Diamond / Obsidian, Coax Cable, Obsidian
Detector Van	-, Yagi Antenna, - / Glass Pane, Signal Meter, Glass Pane / Coal Block, Iron Block, Coal Block
Wire Hood	Iron Ingot, Coax Cable, Iron Ingot / Leather, Glass Pane, Leather
Wire Jacket	Leather, -, Leather / Iron Ingot, Coax Cable, Iron Ingot / Leather, Iron Ingot, Leather
Wire Waders	Iron Ingot, Coax Cable, Iron Ingot / Leather, -, Leather / Leather, -, Leather
Wire Boots	Leather, -, Leather / Iron Ingot, -, Iron Ingot
Wire Dimension Remote	-, Yagi Antenna, - / Iron Ingot, Betamax Tape (The Wire), Iron Ingot / Iron Ingot, Button, Iron Ingot

Everything is also in the The Idiot's Lantern creative tab, and the TV Repairman sells most of it (including, from 2.0, the Cut-price Television, which can't be crafted).

Motor Scooter: right-click to ride. It steers where you look; W accelerates and S brakes. It climbs single blocks. Hit it three times (or once while sneaking) to pick it up.

---

Configuration

Edit config/idiotslantern.cfg, or go to Mods → The Idiot's Lantern → Config in game.

• general:
  • kill victims, or leave them Faceless
  • whether The Wire affects players, bosses and named mobs
  • an entity blacklist (for example dalekmod:dalek)
  • on-screen taunts
• wireTV / transmitter / infection:
  • The Wire's range, drain time and victims at once
  • line of sight, and the transmitter's lightning area
  • how fast it spreads, lightning conversion, and how far it flees
• broadcast:
  • national channels and their strength, and the Band III channels (10-13) on their own switch
  • transmitter range, and range per mast section
  • rain and thunder loss, and storm interference
  • whether terrain blocks signal, coax cable loss, and how much a relay boosts a national channel
  • how often Coronation Day comes
  • how far Wire-controlled sets reach their viewers
  • how long a Continuity Desk plays each item, and whether transmitters relay off air
• performance / integration / counterplay: idle-television throttling and tile-sync de-duplication, Dalek immunity, Earthing Rod and Faraday Cage radii, Wire storm frequency and reward
• villages (new, applies to chunks that haven't been generated yet):
  • more villages on/off and the grid spacing (12 chunks by default; vanilla is 32)
  • the village television kit on/off
• productions (2.0): episode length for player channels.
• engineering (2.0): trip and reset temperatures, auto-reset, heating and cooling rates, maximum power, serial episode length and daily parts, lightning trips, desk reach.
• links (2.0): dish range and beam width, link budget, rain and thunder fade, chunk loading and its radius, how often and how likely The Wire hops down a link, the Faraday Cage radius at a dish, talkback radius.
• wireWorld (2.0): hunger thresholds and decay, trap setback, drain and infection speed by stage, the Coronation seizure (on/off, time, boost, drain), the Magpie trade (on/off, price, days before it turns).
• foundation (2.1): research rate, sample interval and samples per chart sheet, decoder range, breaches on/off, integrity loss when unpowered and from lightning, villager and player experiments on/off, the village's reputation loss and how far and long distrust lasts, discharge cooldown, jammer radius, the inversion carrier's minimum power, duration, phase tolerance and speech bonus, the hunger a wrong carrier feeds, ruins on/off and rarity, crumbling on/off and chance.
• street (2.1): the detector van's range, range per carrier digit, speed and sets radius; crowds on/off, their radius, size and which programmes draw them.
• wireArmour (2.1.1): pieces for immunity, slowdown per piece, wear while feeding, wear near a live Wire.
• wireverse (2.1.1): on/off and dimension id (restart), scale, screens on/off, exits anywhere or only your own set, labels, screen range and ticks, exposure on/off and safe seconds, drain damage, lightning rate and damage, corruption, tape skips, faceless wanderers, whispers, phantom glitches, client screen glitches.
• portable: reach, drain time and hunger.
• visuals (your own game only):
  • TV pictures, how far away they're drawn (and how far Network Monitor walls are), and TV sound and volume
  • lightning spark particles, and a late-draw option for stubborn shader packs
  • studio camera resolution (1-4 times 96x72), interlacing, and the camera frame rate

TV sound uses the Jukebox/Note Blocks volume slider.

Compatibility

• Dalek Mod: designed as a companion, with no dependency either way. Daleks are ignored by The Wire (integration.daleksImmune, matched by entity id in the integration.dalekModId namespace). The entity blacklist still works for anything else.
• Shader packs (Complementary, BSL and others): everything is drawn with textures so the packs keep it. Spark particles glow under shaders. If a pack still hides the lightning, turn on visuals.drawLightningLate.
• Security and alarm mods (SecurityCraft, HBM and the like): the Containment Alarm is a plain redstone source, so their alarms, cameras and keycard doors can be driven from it.
• Uses no mixins, core mods or access transformers. Coax networks never load chunks. TV pictures are shared per channel, so a street full of sets costs about as much as one.

FAQ

My TV only shows snow. Check it's switched on (sneak-right-click) and connected by coax to an aerial that can see the sky. At night Lantern Two closes down; try channel 1.

The Wire killed me in the middle of building. Stay out of its line of sight, or work in Creative. A Betamax Recorder can trap it from a distance.

How do I kill The Wire for good? Research it at the Obsidian Foundation until the Dossier shows the full signature and the inversion theory, then fire the inversion carrier through a transmitter whose reach covers every Wire set. Until then, trap it on tapes as before.

Can I keep the Foundation but skip the grim parts? Yes: foundation.villagerExperiments=false and foundation.playerExperiments=false keep villagers and players out of the Feeding Lock. Animals and monsters still give data, and so do the instruments.

The remote does nothing. The Wireverse is off (wireverse.enabled) or its dimension id clashed with another mod's: check the log at start-up and change wireverse.dimensionId.

I can't get out of the Wireverse. Press the remote anywhere; if you lost it, stand in any screen for a second. If you die there you respawn in the overworld as usual.

Can I turn off the killing? Yes. Set killVictims=false to leave victims faceless instead, or set affectPlayers=false.

Changelog

2.1.1

• Wire Armour: a four-piece Wire-proof suit (immunity with a full set, slower drains with fewer, wears while it works), with the Wire-Proof advancement.
• The Wireverse: a new dimension (id 1953) behind every television screen, reached with the Wire Dimension Remote: corrupted snow terrain with macroblocks, shears, raster lines, rifts, eaten patches of the ordinary world, floating islands and lattice masts; red lightning; phantom glitch blocks; faceless wanderers; whispers and stray broadcasts; tape skips; a sky with The Wire's face in it; exposure sickness without armour; picture tears and snow.
• Travel between televisions: every running set has a screen in the Wireverse (1:8, any dimension) that you can climb out of, with The Picture Between the Lines, Channel Hopping, Interdimensional Television and The Tape Jumped advancements; server switches for private sets and labels.
• Instruments redrawn: the Foundation's oscilloscope, spectrum receiver, chart recorder and speech decoder draw into their own textures (phosphor afterglow, clipped text, a creeping chart) and no longer flicker; the tank's lightning coil crossfades instead of snapping.
• Handbook chapter The Wireverse; JEI pages; new config categories wireArmour and wireverse; five new sounds.

2.1.0 "Obsidian"

• The Obsidian Foundation: Containment Tank, Experiment Console, Oscilloscope, Spectrum Receiver, Chart Recorder, Speech Decoder, Feeding Lock (beside the tank or anywhere on its coax, as many as you like), Observation Bed, Containment Alarm (redstone outputs), Restraint Straps and the Dossier. Research in five fields (spectral, waveform, phase, behaviour, speech) uncovers a seed-based signature unique to each world.
• The inversion carrier and the Jamming Transmitter: destroy The Wire within a transmitter's reach. A wrong carrier feeds it and costs you the mast. Destroying it everywhere makes the next Wire a new strain.
• The Detector Van: drivable, two seats, with a dashboard map, direction-finder compass, signal meter, sets counter, bearings, triangulation and printed survey maps.
• Coronation crowds: villagers gather round working sets for the big broadcasts.
• Ruined laboratories: rare, crumbling, decorative ruins with burnt pages to read.
• The Engineer's Handbook gains three chapters (The Foundation, The Inversion, The Detector Van) and two diagrams; 11 new advancements; JEI information pages for the new equipment; new config categories foundation and street.
• Faceless creatures are no longer targeted by The Wire. The build now always reads the sources as UTF-8.

2.0.2

• Control panel polish: feed buttons on the Network Control Node now fit their labels (with tooltips), map labels sit clear of their markers, counts read "1 TRANSMITTER" / "2 DISHES", the map legend includes ISOLATED, meter labels no longer collide with the needle, and name and caption fields show the start of their text.

2.0.1

• The Engineer's Handbook, rebuilt: an illustrated book instead of a plain written book. Twelve chapters (Getting a Picture, Aerials & Signal, Your Own Station, The Studio, The Control Desk, Microwave Links, Serials & Plays, The Wire, Traps & Wards, Instruments, Recipes, About), a contents page, chapter tabs, a ribbon back to the contents, clickable cross-links, arrow keys / A-D / mouse wheel to turn pages, eight technical diagrams, worked examples, and every recipe read live from the game and drawn as a crafting grid with item icons and tooltips. If the book can't be drawn for any reason it falls back to a plain-text copy.

2.0.0 "Alexandra Palace"

• Lantern Productions: generated serials and plays (StoryGen), seven serials plus the nightly Playhouse, new serial slots on four national channels, interlude films, caption slides, the network-join ident. Betamax tapes of generated programmes replay exactly, from the start.
• Transmitter Control Desk with the first proper GUI in the mod: meters, lamps, switches, faders. Transmitters gain power control, valve temperature, cooling, overheat and lightning trips, VSWR, a fault log, station names and ten programme sources.
• Microwave Link Dish and Network Control Node: tower-to-tower links with a link budget, terrain and rain fade; a network map, telemetry and remote control, shared feeds, NETWORK JOIN, ISOLATE, talkback and chunk loading.
• The Wire: hunger stages, travelling down links, the Coronation seizure of the greatest transmitter, Mr Magpie's cut-price televisions, lightning surges, four new advancements.
• Engineer's Handbook: ten new pages (recipes now start on page 27).
• Reviewed by independent passes after building; fixes included feed loops that could trap The Wire on a network, a seizure that never let go, desk discovery, placement collisions and locale-safe text.

1.6.0 The stable release of everything in 1.5.2 and the experimental 1.5.3, reviewed and fixed. Highlights:

• Fixes:
  • A full Continuity Desk ate the tape or book you clicked it with.
  • Endless experience from a Wire storm: cleansing a set, re-releasing The Wire from a portable set or tape and cleansing it again paid out every time.
  • Forced Wire storms never ended with doWeatherCycle off, and a restart could start, announce or award a storm twice.
  • The Wire could drain a player who had just changed dimension.
  • Tile updates could leave a television half up to date for a player who walked into range; clients also never learned that a transmitter was possessed (the meter map missed it).
  • A comparator wired back from a transmitter flickered on and off.
  • Cables drew an arm toward a Coax Router face that wasn't connected; the router and Continuity Desk hitboxes were wrong.
  • Studio camera pictures: interlacing smeared captions and left combs after wipes. The Studio Clock never showed its captions.
  • Lantern Text's Coronation countdown was a day out and ignored the config.
  • Text ran off the screen in a dozen programmes.
  • A ragged wall of monitors rebuilt its picture several times a frame.
  • The handbook's redstone page was cut off.
• Faster:
  • Idle televisions are spread out, so there's no lag spike every 20 seconds.
  • Breaking a block no longer throws away every cached signal path and network in the dimension.
  • Earthing Rod and Faraday Cage checks went from ~100,000 block reads to a short list.
  • The camera tracer no longer allocates per ray.
  • Monitor walls stop driving every camera at full speed.
  • Shared victim searches no longer cost more than the ones they replace.
• Changed:
  • A ragged monitor wall is one picture over its bounding rectangle; its settings live on the bottom-left block.
  • Coax switches on a fast redstone clock refresh their line at most twice a second.

1.5.3 (experimental)

• Fixes: the signal ray-trace cache could return another path's result (keys collided) and mixed dimensions; its timestamps were kept in a float and drifted after about nine days; it is now keyed by dimension and both end points and is discarded when blocks change. Server-side broadcast state is cleared when the server stops, and a Portable Television's in-use entry is dropped when a player logs out.
• Performance: televisions with no player nearby re-tune every 400 ticks instead of 40 and don't search for victims; tile syncs that would send the same data are skipped.
• New: Earthing Rod, Faraday Cage, Engineer's Handbook, Wire storms, advancements, comparator outputs on the Transmitter and Network Monitor, Dalek immunity, German / French / Spanish name translations.
• Housekeeping: update.json template, unit tests for the signal maths and calendar (gradlew test -PrunTests).
• Also: Coax Router, shared coax network scans, shared victim searches, delta tile syncs, NEXT lines in the Network Monitor ticker, optional JEI info pages (-PwithJei). See CHANGELOG.md.

1.5.2 (experimental)

• 29 new programmes across all six channels, including Lantern Text and the Coronation fireworks, and a station ident for player channels.
• Studio cameras at up to 4x resolution, interlaced; five lenses; panning with a stick.
• Vision mixer: cut / mix / wipe, VT and clock sources, redstone-driven cuts.
• New blocks: Studio Clock, Caption Generator (strap, name super, ticker, slides), Continuity Desk (a running order with idents, title cards and "next" captions).
• Off-air relays: a transmitter with nothing loaded rebroadcasts what a set on its cable receives.
• Sounds: the new programmes reuse the existing soundtracks (no new audio in this build).
• Saved cameras keep their lens: the old three-lens setting maps onto the new five.

1.5.1

• Fixed villages not becoming more common in modpacks. The village generator swap now runs after other mods', keeps another mod's village generator instead of overwriting it, and the spacing is checked again on the overworld's real generator when the world loads, so a mod that replaces the generator later can't quietly undo it.

Credits

Inspired by the Doctor Who episode The Idiot's Lantern (BBC, 2006). Made as a fan tribute; all assets are original.