Scribe: Notes & Tasks

Vintage Story is an epic journey — and a logistical nightmare. You log off mid-project, trek 3,000 blocks for ore, and by the time you return, that vital mental note to 'smelt bronze before winter' has completely evaporated somewhere between baking pies and clayforming.

Scribe is my attempt to bridge that gap — a mod for keeping your goals inside the world, instead of on a sticky note next to your monitor.

Delivered in v1.4: Multiplayer Task Assignment, Mod Integration, & Linux Fixes

Mod integration as of 1.4.2 includes:
Notice Board, VS Quest (e.g. VS Village), and Progression Framework (e.g. Seafarer)!

 

Delivered in v1.3: Crafting Tasks & Chalkboard

Delivered in v1.2: Tracker & Linked Task types,
& Scriptorium block: Copy/Paste & Import/Export

 

Delivered in v1.1: Animated Timers & Darkness!

Delivered in v1.0: Tablets, Notebooks, and the Lectern

📖 What you get

• To-do lists, notes, items, and links — Craft in-game items to track your in-game progress. Use checkable tasks, long text notes, links to handbook entries, items counters, or even build lists for crafting items (new in v1.3) to stay on track. Click the Arrow next to "Add Task" to choose between types. 
• Clay & Wax Tablets (new in v1.0) — the earliest, cheapest writing surface, craftable in the stone age long before a Notebook or Lectern. A quick handheld scratchpad (up to 10 tasks, 1 pin). A fresh clay tablet is wet and editable; left alone it dries hard over a couple of in-game days, locking the writing — then dunk it in water to soften it back and revise, or fire it in a fire pit to make the writing permanent. The Wax Tablet is a reusable step up that never dries or fires. Tablet text is written in a carved-wedge cuneiform script by default (toggle to plain text in Settings). Clay comes in red, blue, and fire-clay colours.
• Chalkboard (new in v1.3) — a placeable wall hanging for Scribe. Tasks, notes, and the Pinned, Guest Book, and History tabs. Multiplayer-safe: edits sync live, one person edits at a time while everyone else reads. Notably limited to 10 tasks. 
• Notebook — a carried, craftable item you write in anywhere. Same task checklist + notes as the Lectern, but personal and portable: it's yours, it travels with you, and it quietly keeps a History chronicle of what happened while you carried it (crafted, picked up, deaths, PvP and boss kills, temporal storms).
• Clockmaker's Notebook — the Notebook's advanced sibling, adding a Timer tab for real-time and in-game-time reminders that fire a toast and sound (optionally alongside your pinned tasks). Crafted from a Notebook + a temporal gear + metal parts. Its craft is gated to the Clockmaker character class (the tinkerer trait) by default, or anyone can craft it with the trader-sold Schematic. Animation delivered in v1.1.0.
• Lectern block — a craftable, placeable notebook you write directly on. Task checklist + freeform note section. Multiplayer-safe: edits sync live, one person edits at a time while everyone else reads. Drop one outside your base and its Guest Book tab records visitors, who can leave a note.
• Scriptorium block (new in v1.2) — a desk that extends the Lectern with the ability to Copy/Paste between Scribe items, as well as allowing you to export their tasks from the game, and back in. Makes coordinating for a multiplayer server easier, or allows for easier record keeping across years, or across entirely different save files. Supports JSON and TSV (similar to CSV, but you can just paste it into Google Sheets or Excel).
• Assignment Desk (new in v1.4) — the hub of sharing out work through Scribe. Create assignments to send to other players instantly, or with hand-delivered task notices (may depend on your server settings). Features the unique "Create Assignments" and "Sent Assignment History" tabs. 
• Inbox (new in v1.4) — a placed mailbox for receiving Task Notices or instant assignments. Glows with particles when you've been assigned a task! Features the non-unique "Assignment Inbox" tab and the "Inbox Inventory" tab (for slotting Task Notices).
• Pinned Task HUD — hover any task, click the pin icon, and it appears on an always-on overlay visible while you play. Your pins are yours — pinning doesn't affect other players on the same Lectern.
• Pin Tab — a dedicated view that lists all your pinned tasks across every Scribe item and Lectern in the world, editable in place.
• Scribe Settings — all preferences in one panel: pixel-art notebook theme, window size, HUD anchor and size, completion policy, font selector, and a UI sound mute. Everything updates live.
• Font selector — pick the typeface for your task and note text: Scapholène, Caudex, La Belle Aurore, Noto Sans, Noto Serif, Playfair Display, or Cormorant Unicase.
• Focus on Immersion — you ever write in the dark? Scribe respects your local light levels, so bring a torch if you want to read anything at night or in a cave!

🔧 Getting started

1. Install the required mod: LibGUI from the mod DB (hard dependency — don't skip this).
2. In game, craft a Clay Tablet — the fastest way in, no writing set or fired ink needed:
   
   A knife, a stick, and twelve clay. Crafts one wet, ready-to-write tablet.
3. Hold the tablet and right-click to open it, then type your tasks straight in. Shift + right-click quick-adds a task. Leave a clay tablet alone and it dries hard, locking the writing. Dunk it in water to soften it back, or fire it in a fire pit to permanently lock it in.
4. Hover a task row → click the pin icon → task appears on your HUD immediately.
5. Ready for more room? Craft a Notebook to carry a full checklist and notes anywhere, or place a Lectern to write on and share with others.

For crafting recipes, keyboard shortcuts, completion policies, and the full settings reference, see the in-game handbook entires/guides or the Scribe wiki on GitHub (out of date).

📌 The Pinned Task HUD

Pinned tasks show as a compact, glow-outlined list over the game world — no background plate, just readable text wherever you've anchored it. It defaults to the top-right corner with enough clearance for the minimap (and automatically removes that clearance if you've hidden the minimap).

Checking a task off from the HUD starts a 1.5-second undo window — the text fades as a countdown. Uncheck within the window to fully cancel (nothing is sent to the server). When the window elapses, your chosen completion policy fires: keep it pinned, keep and sink to bottom, unpin, unpin and sink to bottom, or delete the task from the document entirely.

Press P (rebindable under Controls → Scribe) or click the ▾ header to collapse the HUD to just its header. Position, size, row cap, and text scale are all configurable in Scribe Settings.

⚙️ Scribe Settings

Open from the gear icon in the Lectern sidebar or the gear on the HUD header — same panel either way. Notable options:

• Pixel-Art Display — toggles the notebook backdrop art and Scribe's parchment theme on/off. Off = your global game GUI theme.
• Pixel Art Size — the Lectern window width. Scales the whole layout live.
• Task text font — font selector for task and note row text.
• HUD position — pick any corner or mid-edge anchor, nudge with X/Y offsets.
• Mute Scribe UI sounds — silences Scribe's own button clicks without affecting the rest of the game.

All settings above are per-player. The one server setting is to grant easier access to Clockmaker's Notebooks, disabling the need for either the Trait or the Schematic. A server can lift that with /worldconfig scribeClockmakerRequiresTrait false (takes effect on restart).

🗺️ Roadmap

Note-taking tools grow with your tech tree — scratchy clay in the stone age, carried books and placed lecterns in the metal age, shared boards later. v1.0 completes that early-to-mid arc.

• ✅ v0.1 — Lectern + Pinned HUD (released)
• ✅ v0.2 — Notebook & Clockmaker's Notebook — a carried item for personal notes with a passive History chronicle; the Clockmaker's variant adds timers and reminders (released)
• ✅ v1.0 — Clay & Wax Tablets — the early-game handheld tier, with the dry/harden/re-wet/fire life-cycle and a cuneiform script; Scribe's first "complete" cut (released)
• ✅ v1.1 — QoL Update — Refining animations, Shift+Right Click opens an empty task for quick capture, Scribe interfaces respect light & darkness around you, new "Note" alternative without a checkbox. 
• ✅ v1.2 — New Task Types & Writing Desk (Scriptorium) — a private block with richer organization and copy/paste export between the Lectern, Notebook, and Desk.
• ✅ v1.3 — Crafting (Ingredient) Tasks & Chalkboard — We now add Crafting Tasks which autogenerate trackers for ingredients at the right counts. This also introduced Subtasks: any task can be a subtask, just click the grip-bars when in Edit mode. The Chalkboard is wall-mounted and sharable.
• ✅ v1.4 — Task Assignment & Other Extensions — Assignment Desk block for giving tasks to others, Inbox block & Inbox tabs for accepting tasks. Quest support (VS Quest and Progression Framework. Translations. All-platform support (Windows, Mac, Linux). Scribe integration capability extended to other mods, notably Notice Board!
• Have a suggestion? Share it and help us improve Scribe! — Many of the above changes were initially suggested by users like you! Scribe is better due to community involvement, so thank you!

View the changelog (in the "Files" tab) for more detailed information.

📚 Translations

Scribe's new translations were largely machine-generated, but special callout to C4BR3R4 and Arquimago  for their special care and manual effort.

📚 You might also like

If you're into putting your mark on the world, these mods pair well with Scribe:

🔗 Requirements

• Vintage Story 1.22.x
• LibGUI (gui) 3.1.0 — required on both client and server

Source and issue tracker: github.com/EdzyWhat/vintagestory-scribe-libgui

For other mod authors:

I've got a first version of a way for your mod to call Scribe: ScribeModSystem.TryCreateExternalTask. One direct, in-process, server-side call lets your mod create a task on a player's behalf in Scribe — no networking, no need to understand Scribe's document format. Take Scribe as an optional soft dependency, then call: scribeModSystem.TryCreateExternalTask(player, title, bodyText, extraInfo)

• player (required): A IServerPlayer player, the specific player who should receive the task (typically whoever triggered your mod's event server-side).
• title (optional): a checkbox task. 1000 character limit
• bodyText (optional): a note nested under it, or standalone if there's no title. 10,000 character limit.
• extraInfo (optional): a small hover-info icon on the created row (source, author, a link back to your own UI... whatever's useful). Never shown on the HUD, only in the Read/Edit/Pin Tab. 1000 character limit.
• Targets the player's last-opened writeable Scribe item, else their first writeable one. If they have none, they're told directly why (nothing you need to build UI for).
• Returns true/false for your own control flow.
• Line breaks are respected if you have \n in your title, bodytext, or extraInfo string.
• Checking for Scribe instead of hard-depending on it: api.ModLoader.IsModEnabled("scribe"), then api.ModLoader.GetModSystem<ScribeModSystem>() and null-check the result before calling TryCreateExternalTask.
• Want to test it without writing code? In chat type /scribe external title|body|extraInfo

💬 Credits, Thanks, & Licensing

• Anego Studio — the incredible developers of Vintage Story. Thank you! 
• LibGUI by ripls — the UI framework that powers Scribe's interface. Saves an enormous amount of work, and enables powerful animations.
• Atlas by Pixnop — a headless VS server test harness that made integration testing actually possible.
• Notice Board by propaneko — Integrates with Scribe starting with NB v3.0.1 and S v1.4.2. See the "For other mod authors" section for details. 
• Seralth — developed working cross-Linux fix for LibGUI crashing (since independently implemented into Scribe starting with 1.4.0-rc.2)
• JeanPierre — inspiration for the task-pinning concept, and the tactile nature of his mods.
• Arquimago — Brazilian Portuguese translation.
• Artekuno — suggested the Scapholène font and the option to mute Scribe's audio.

This mod uses the following third-party assets:

Fonts: Caudex (SIL OFL), Scapholène (Scapholène Font License v1.0), La Belle Aurore (SIL OFL), Noto Sans (SIL OFL), Noto Serif (SIL OFL). All shipped unmodified. Playfair Display and Cormorant Unicase provided by LibGUI.

Audio: alarm_clock_ringing_01.wav by joedeshon on Freesound, CC by 4.0 (converted to .ogg file)