Wicklen: Chronicles

A small spirit follows you through Minecraft, and a field journal keeps track of what you find. Observe wildlife with a spyglass, give discoveries your own names, and build a map as you travel. When you find a waystation, you can start First Light, a short expedition with a choice of tasks and supplies to earn.

You can use the journal, map and quests without an AI service. Talking to the spirit and asking it for game help need a separately configured language model.

Start with a spyglass

Press G to open the journal. It shows your next step, discoveries, tasks and map. Use /spirit summon to show your companion.

Hold a vanilla spyglass on a visible creature or supported place for about two seconds.

Once the observation is recorded, open Records to give it a name or write a note. You could call a species “Moss Cows” or leave yourself a reminder about a place you want to revisit.

Your notes are personal. Naming a species in the journal does not rename the animals in the world.

Make a map of your travels

The journal's atlas fills in nearby surface terrain as you explore the Overworld. Places you have not visited stay hidden by fog. Select a recorded place and choose Follow for a direction and distance; you can stop following it at any time. The dotted line points towards the destination, so you still need to find your own way around cliffs and other obstacles.

Find your first expedition

Three kinds of waystation can appear in new Overworld chunks. Observe one with your spyglass, then open Tasks → First Light in the journal.

Choose an available approach: survey the area, observe wildlife, or take on a courtyard battle when the optional combat mod is installed. The journal tracks your progress and shows the reward. After finishing, return to the task page to claim your supplies. There is no time limit.

First Light is a short introduction. Longer story chains are still planned. Waystations do not get added to chunks that already exist.

Take something useful with you

Use a Field Notebook on a vanilla cartography table to make a personal field desk. Every three new discoveries earn you a supply kit for another trip.

Win a courtyard trial to earn the Wayfarer's Lantern. It gives brief absorption and speed, can be used again after 60 seconds, and is not consumed. Courtyard battles require Gateway of Doom.

Installation

You need Minecraft 26.3, Java 25, Fabric Loader 0.20.1 or newer, and Fabric API. The tested Fabric API version is 0.165.0+26.3.

Put wicklen-chronicles-0.4.3.jar in your instance's mods/ folder. For multiplayer, install the same version on the server and every player's client. For single player, installing it in your client is enough. Remove older copies first; the -sources.jar is for developers.

The Wicklen modpack is not required.

Optional mods:

• Gateway of Doom adds courtyard battles. Without it, First Light still has exploration and wildlife tasks. Tested with Gateway of Doom 2.3.6 for Fabric 26.3.
• Field Guide lets compatible wildlife scans count in Chronicles too, so you do not have to scan the same creature twice. Chronicles also has its own spyglass observations. The integration targets Field Guide 1.23.

Conversations with the spirit

Choose one of four personalities and colours for your companion. Its speech appears in a small card over the world, and the conversation stays in the journal. Journal settings let you move the card, adjust the interface and control automatic remarks.

Free-form conversations and vanilla-game help need an AI provider. Configure it in config/wicklen-chronicles.json on the server, or in your single-player instance. You can use DeepSeek, OpenAI, Ollama or a custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Hosted APIs may charge for use. Multiplayer players do not need the server's API key on their clients.

When you use these features, the configured provider receives your in-game name, message, recent dialogue and some gameplay context. That can include your biome, health, nearby threats, your discovery names and notes, expedition progress, relevant server rumours and pet memories. Other players' personal notes are excluded. The journey-memory summary omits world seed, UUIDs and global coordinates, but a message or note can still contain information you type. You can run Ollama locally to keep generation on your own machine.

Set proactive: false to turn off automatic AI remarks; manual conversations remain available when a provider is configured. Maps, observations, task goals and rewards work without a model. If optional AI choices for stories or battles are unavailable, the mod uses prepared choices. See the configuration guide for provider setup and request limits.

About this release

The main implementation was generated with AI coding tools from the maintainer's instructions. AI also helped with documentation and translations and was used to create the spirit design concepts.

The screenshots show the English interface of Chronicles 0.4.3 in local test worlds. They are original game captures. The demonstration dialogue is supplied test text sent through the real game protocol, not a recorded AI response.

Source code · Report a bug · Release notes

Project code is licensed under MIT.