Limes

Guard your land with watchtowers, walls and gates, like the Romans did.

Build watchtowers, light a watch fire on top and link the fires into a border. Once the border closes into a ring, the land inside becomes a protected zone: fewer monsters spawn, pillager patrols stay away and phantoms leave you alone. Palisades, stone walls, ditches and battlements between the towers make the zone stronger. Your towers and walls can look however you like: the mod surveys what you built, and the rule is simple. A border is only as strong as its weakest segment.

How it works

1. Watch fires: Build a tower and put a watch fire on top. The higher it stands above the terrain, the further it reaches.
2. Decempeda: The Roman measuring rod. Right-click one fire, then a second one, and the two towers form a border segment, as long as they can see each other and the segment crosses no other.
3. Zones: A closed ring of segments makes a zone. Inside, fewer natural monsters spawn.
4. Build it up: A palisade or a stone wall from tower to tower raises the protection. A ditch in front or merlons and machicolations on top raise it once more.
5. Defend it: Break the wall and there is a breach. The zone falls back to its weakest protection until the gap is closed, the horn sounds and the towers send up smoke. Raids on a zone raise the alarm too.

Features

• Watch fires in three tiers: watch fire, signal fire and great signal fire, each upgraded in place.
  • Range grows with the square root of the height above the terrain, measured on a ring around the tower, so a hill on one side does not count.
  • Right-click a fire for its status: name, tier, height, range, segments and zones.
  • Name your towers with a name tag or an anvil. Fires belong to whoever placed them.
• Border segments:
  • The sight line runs from fire to fire. Glass, bars and portcullises do not block it, and smoke shows where it is blocked.
  • Segments must not cross, seen from above. A segment that no longer fits becomes inactive instead of being deleted.
• Protection values from 1 to 4:
  • Line of sight 1, palisade 2, stone wall 3, +1 for a ditch or battlements.
  • Spawns of natural monsters drop by 25 / 50 / 75 / 90 %.
  • No pillager patrols from protection 3, no phantoms from protection 4.
  • Nested zones are possible, and the stronger one counts.
• Walls are surveyed, not placed: Any stone wall or wooden palisade along the line counts, three blocks high by default, diagonal walls included. When the wall does not reach the other tower, the survey tells you where it ends. A ditch can hold water, and bridges across it do not fill it.
• Breaches: Breaking or blowing up the wall opens a breach. A thick wall survives a single hole, and filling the ditch costs its bonus.
• Alarm: A raid on a zone or a breach in its wall is announced to the players inside and to the tower owners, with a named gate nearby if there is one. A horn sounds at the towers, and their watch fires send up a tall smoke column: for two minutes on a raid, longer while new waves arrive, and until a breach is closed.
• Defensive building blocks: in cobblestone, stone bricks, bricks, sandstone and deepslate, from the stonecutter.
  • Arrow slits: arrows fly out, but only 1 % of those from outside get through. Stacked slits join into one long slit.
  • Merlons: tall, low and with an arrow slit. They join at corners like stairs, on diagonal walls too.
  • Machicolations: drop stones on attackers or pour lava to set the ground below on fire. Corbelling is the closed floor to go with them.
  • Caltrops: slow and hurt everything that walks over them. Mobs avoid them, and sneaking players stay safe.
• Gates:
  • Portcullis of iron or wood in any size up to 8 × 8, opened by hand, lever or redstone.
  • Swing gates in three sizes and any wood, including wood from other mods. Two leaves make a double gate.
  • Drawbridge across the ditch, raised and lowered by hand or redstone.
  • Gates can be named and locked: open to everyone, to the owner and friends (/limes friends), or to the owner only. Locked gates ignore redstone and cannot be broken by others.
• In-game handbook: the Border Warden's Handbook explains everything, with recipes and the server's own values.

Built for servers

• Event-driven: Zones are recomputed only when the border changes, and the spawn check is a quick lookup. Breaches come from block events, and the end of an alarm comes from a scheduled queue checked once per second. There is no per-tick work, and chunks are loaded only once, when a segment is surveyed.
• Ownership and permissions: Towers and gates belong to whoever placed them. Rights use the NeoForge permission API, so permission mods such as LuckPerms can grant them per player or group. Operators may do everything.
• Configurable: Ranges, minimum tower height, zone size, wall height, ditch depth, coverage for ditch and battlements, spawn reduction per protection value, gate sizes and more are set in a synced server config.
• Datapack-friendly: Tags decide what counts as wall, palisade, bridge or see-through block, and which items can be dropped through machicolations.
• English and German.

Coming soon

• Watchtower ruins to repair.

Requirements

• Minecraft 26.3 with NeoForge 26.3.0.39-beta or newer.
• Required on both server and client.