The Waking World

The world has an old, forgotten history - and it is waking up.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/K47KIgOEuzc - Source and issues: https://github.com/Lovkar-Squid/the-waking-world - Discord: discord.gg/BVztrTtXFu - Patreon: patreon.com/Lovkar

Somewhere under the hills, six kinds of sleeping giants wait for a horn. Find the letters the dead left behind, follow them to the shrines and the vaults, gather what a rite needs, and wake a Colossus built from the land it sleeps in: forty blocks of stone, ice, sand, moss, prismarine or earth that stomps, hurls boulders, uproots trees and picks you up. Break its cores, bring it down, and it collapses into a real ruin you can walk through - or turn the whole battlefield back with an hourglass. Six hearts later, a key opens the way to the Titan in the End.

No dependencies. Works on servers.

Colossi

Six kinds - Stone, Earth, Sand, Ice, the Sea and the Grove - each with its own body, signature moves, glowing cores and battle theme. A giant is built from the actual blocks round its shrine, so no two look the same. Three phases, twenty attacks, craters that stay (or don't - it is your config), trees broken through, water waded, cliffs climbed. Cores are the weak points: hit them, break enough of them, and the giant can finally die - half a minute of collapse, limb by limb, with the crack echoing across the land. A carved-stone boss bar shows the runes, the phase and every core.

Shrines and rites

Standing Stones, Barrows, Sand Tombs, Frost Cairns, Sunken Shrines and Overgrown Sanctums hide an Altar of the Sleeper. Lay down a Sleeper's Ember, the Rune of the land and the land's gift, sound the Horn of Waking, and watch the rite: runes climb, the ground answers, the giant rises out of the earth.

Dungeons and mobs

Sleeper's Vaults, the Drowned Cistern, the Ember Forge and the Void Reliquary in the End. Stone Thralls, Ember Wraiths, Rune Sentinels and Drowned Keepers, with their own looks and sounds - a few also wander the world at night.

Ruins, hamlets and kingdoms

Weathered cottages, wells, watchtowers, chapels, crypts and whole empty villages. And walled kingdoms: a moat, eight towers, barbicans, a market town and a keep with a great hall, a throne and a treasury. Guards keep the peace, townsfolk trade (the surveyor sells maps), and the king grants an audience with news of what has woken and fallen in your world. Rob the treasury or raise a hand against him and the town turns on you; kill him and the kingdom crowns a successor.

Dead Letters

Letters in ruin and vault chests were written for your world: they point at the nearest shrine, vault or kingdom in paces and winds, name the offerings a rite needs and carry a compass on the page. With a free Google AI Studio key they are written by Gemini about the actual places and events of your world - and read aloud in their writer's own voice, the words lighting up as they are spoken. Without a key, the built-in letters are used. The Waker's Almanac you get on first join explains the rest without spoiling it.

Your own free Gemini key (optional)

1. https://aistudio.google.com/apikey -> Create API key (in a new project - each project has its own free quota).
2. config/wakingworld-server.toml -> [letters] -> geminiLetters = true, geminiApiKey = "AIza...", voicedLetters = true (or the in-game config screen).
3. The key stays on the server, players never see it; a letter is one short request, its voice one more, and nothing is billed unless you turn billing on yourself. Full notes in the README on GitHub.

What leaves your server when Gemini is on: the letter prompt - the names of the nearby structures and the recent events of your world (a giant woken, a king crowned), never chat, player names or anything personal - goes to Google's Gemini API with your key. With it off, nothing is sent anywhere.

Recommended modpack

Lovkar's Waking World Ultimate - the mod with everything set up: Complementary Reimagined + Euphoria Patches with our settings, the performance mods, Waystones, backpacks, Better Combat and dungeons for the road. About fifty projects for NeoForge 1.21.1; install it from the CurseForge app and only add your Gemini key.

Recommended shaders

The trailer was recorded with Complementary Reimagined r5.9 + Euphoria Patches 1.10.0 on Iris 1.8.12 / Sodium 0.6.13. Colossi are real entities built from block models, so shaders light them like the land they came from. Our exact shader settings file is in the repository (docs/shaders/) - drop it into shaderpacks/ next to the patched pack.

The Titan

Craft the Key of the Titan from the six Sigils the giants leave behind, find the Void Sigil, take the Dragon Egg, and stand in the arena floating in the End. Light the six lesser altars with the runes of every land and the Titan rises - twice the size of any colossus, with its own music and its own boss bar. Beat it for the Heart of the End, and the Titan's Gate opens on the rim to carry you home.

Getting started

Read the Almanac. Explore - ruins are common and the letters are in their chests. Follow one to a vault for embers, runes and the Horn; follow another to a shrine. Wake something. Bring a bow or a lot of nerve.

Configuration

config/wakingworld-server.toml: terrain damage and crater scale, the cost of every rite offering, the Titan's requirements, Dragon Egg safety, Gemini letters (geminiApiKey, geminiModel, letterLanguage). config/wakingworld-client.toml: camera shake, boss music. Everything is also in the in-game config screen.

Compatibility

Tested alongside Sodium, Iris + Complementary Reimagined (Euphoria Patches), JourneyMap, JEI, Jade, Entity Culling, ImmediatelyFast, ModernFix and FerriteCore. Shader packs light the giants like the world.

Supporters

The mod is free and stays free. Patreon supporters (Waker, Colossus and Titan tiers) get cosmetic perks and nothing else: auras drawn in the mod's rune language, colossus styles (the giants your rites wake rise as the Sentinel, the Eldest or the Seraph - same silhouette, same hit boxes, other stone), a name in the Hall of Wakers in the Almanac, a word from the king and the guards, a horn in your colour. Every colossus also leaves its own music disc now. Link in the game with /wwpatreon; change your look with /wwpatreon aura <name> and /wwpatreon colossus <name>. No names are published - only a salted hash per account; the supporter service is open source too.

Roadmap

0.2 Cataclysms - meteor showers, a volcano growing before your eyes, a blood-moon siege, tornadoes, earthquakes. Then Named Lands - every region you discover earns a name and a story. Then the newest Minecraft.

Made by Lovkar & Claude. Bugs and ideas: the issue tracker on GitHub. If the mod makes your day, there is a Ko-fi - it pays for the Gemini quota the testing eats.