The Waking World

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

Trailer (0.2): https://youtu.be/CjpReo67QQo The first trailer (0.1): https://youtu.be/K47KIgOEuzc

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.

The Cataclysms

Five things the world can do to a country, and none of them is aimed at you.

The Falling Sky — on a rare night the stars come down. Each one tears a crater, scorches what is round it and leaves a Starstone glowing at the bottom. The Rising Mountain — the ground opens and builds itself upward in front of you, hour by hour, until there is a mountain where there was a field; the flow sets into black rock over the following minutes and the crater keeps its lava for good. The Wandering Column — a tornado that walks, takes whatever is loose and leaves a swathe of snapped trees you can follow from either end. The Turning Ground — the land shakes, then cracks, then settles, and does not close again. The Red Moon — the moon comes up wrong and the dark stops being empty.

Every one of them is announced first: a low note out of the ground, the light going wrong, the animals and the villagers leaving, and a line you did not write. That warning is your whole advantage.

Star Iron

At the bottom of a fresh crater, under the glass, sits the last of the star that made the hole. Blast it and it gives up Star Iron — a full suit turns away half of everything that falls, burns or lands on you, which is the answer to the whole of the paragraph above. The same metal makes tools a little harder than diamond, and three of it will hold a Sleeper's Ember, so a meteor is also a road to waking a giant.

The Named Lands

Walk far enough and the country tells you what it is called. Every region is named the first time somebody enters it, with a line about what it is, shown as a card and drawn onto the Wayfarer's Chart you carry — only the lands you have walked, which is what makes it a record and not a map. With a Gemini key the names and their lore are written for your actual ground.

One world, not two halves

Waking a giant leaves that land unquiet, and killing one leaves it far worse. While that lasts, cataclysms are likelier there and they come looking for it — so a country full of dead colossi is a country that shakes, and where you do your waking is a decision. It runs the other way too: a cataclysm breaking over a shrine can open it, with no rite and nobody's leave. And a giant already awake under a blood moon is faster and hits harder until it sets.

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

Take only the half you want. config/wakingworld-server.toml opens with [features], one switch per part of the mod: colossi, titan, cataclysms, kingdoms, ruins, namedLands. Switch one off and it is not there - nothing of it generates and nothing of it runs. Only the giants, only the cataclysms, or everything but the kingdoms: it is one line either way, and the rest of the mod carries on without it. The rest of the file is the finer grain: terrain damage and crater scale, the odds of each of the five cataclysms, 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.

Roadmap

0.3 — a sixth cataclysm, and kingdoms that grow or refuse you depending on how you have treated them. Then a port to the newest Minecraft. A 1.20.1 version once 1.21.1 is solid.

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.