Tree Carve

First release. Leave a message on a tree.

No new item to craft

Sneak and right-click a log with any sword and the face you hit becomes a carved message. There is nothing to craft and nothing to place - the tool is the sword you already have, and a plain left-click still chops the log exactly as it always did. (#45)

A carving belongs to the trunk it was cut into. Fell the tree and the message goes with it; take an axe to the bark and it strips off with the bark, the way a real mark disappears under the blade. A log that has already lost its bark cannot be carved, because nothing could ever take the message off again. (#44)

It looks like a cut, not like paint

The bark is untouched. Only the lettering reads as fresh-cut timber, in a shade averaged from that species' own stripped texture — so an oak carving, a birch one and a warped stem read as three different woods rather than three neighbouring swatches. Under the face of every cut sits a shadowed groove, which is what makes it read as carved rather than drawn on. (#52, #54, #66, #73)

Lay a line of text over a symbol and it is cut into it: the letters take the dark of the groove against the raised shape, the way they would on a real trunk. (#71)

A canvas, not a form

The carving screen is the block face itself, drawn on the log's own wood. Place text and symbols where you want them, drag them, resize them, turn them - what you arrange is what lands on the trunk, because the screen and the world draw through the same code. Up to sixteen pieces on a face. (#46, #47, #48, #49, #50, #56, #77, #78)

Text can be bold, italic, underlined or struck through, in any combination. (#60)

Seventeen symbols, and five hands to write in

Hearts filled and hollow, an umbrella, a skull, stars, a flower, a note, the sun, a cloud, a snowflake, an anchor, a crown, an arrow, a cross - and the aiaigasa, the umbrella two names shelter under. A pokeball turns up if you have Cobblemon. All of them drawn as art of the mod's own, so one stretched across a whole trunk still has clean edges. (#31, #55, #57, #70, #72)

Messages are cut in a carved typeface by default, with four more to choose from - including the alphabet from the enchanting table and the runes off an illager banner, both of which read like something a blade made. (#34, #59, #74, #75)

Every picker is a list you open, not a button you press seventeen times. (#76)

Colour, if you are carrying it

A piece can be cut in any of the sixteen dyes - the ones in your inventory, and no others. The dye tints the wood rather than replacing it, so a red heart is still a cut in a trunk, and it is spent when you use it. (#68, #69)

Made for servers

Type @ and pick from everyone who has ever joined; the @ disappears and the name stays. (#61)

A carving is rewritten only by the person who cut it, or by an operator - an axe still removes one for anybody standing in front of it. (#67)

/treecarve config turns every part of this on, off or sideways: carving itself, how long a message may be, what the lettering costs in durability, how deep the groove reads, how far a carving is drawn from, and three gates for carving stripped logs, planks or anything an axe mines. Everything in game, everything persisted. (#62)

The server re-checks every position, every size, every symbol and every dye before storing a word of it. (#51)

Requirements

Minecraft 1.21.1, on Fabric or NeoForge, with Architectury API. Not a Cobblemon mod and no Cobblemon dependency - it just knows what a pokeball is. (#53, #63, #64)

Everything below is the development history of this release. None of it was ever published; it is kept because it is the only record of why the mod is shaped the way it is.