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.

📖 What you get

Version 0.2

• Notebook item — a craftable, carryable item that lets your Read, Edit, access your Pins. 
  • Major feature: History — track your kills, deaths, temporal storms survived, bosses vanquished, who crafted the Notebook, and who has picked it up!
• Clockmaker's Notebook item — an augmented Notebook, upgraded with a Timer
  • Major feature: Timer — set and label a timer in real time or in-game time. Need help remembering to take the pies out of the oven? This is the item for you!
  • Crafting a CM Notebook keep's the ingredient Notebook's tasks and history. 
  • Once set, Timers are visible and accessible on their tab in the CM Notebook, and on the Pinned HUD. 
  • Requires the Clockmaker's Tinkerer trait. Disable requirement via worldsettings (takes effect on restart): /worldconfig scribeClockmakerRequiresTrait false 
• Guest Tab — See the Lectern below for more details
• Usability features: Rename your Scribe items & blocks! More reasonable multiplayer editor behavior!

Version 0.1

• Lectern block — a craftable, placeable block you write directly on. Read, Edit, and Pinned tabs for tasks. Multiplayer-safe: edits sync live, one person edits at a time while everyone else reads.
  • Major feature augmented in 0.2: Guest Tab — Drop a Lectern outside your home or gathering place. Visiting players who access it automatically leave a record of their visit, and can add a note.
  • Augmented in 0.2 — Lecterns that are picked off the ground retain their full information. 
• Pinned Task HUD — hover any task in the Lectern, 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.
  • Augmented in 0.2 — the HUD glitches with low Temporal Stability or Temporal Storms. Survive!
  • Augmented in 0.2 — Timers are tracked and interactable on the HUD
• Scribe Settings — all preferences in one panel: pixel-art notebook theme, window size, HUD anchor/offset and size, completion policy, font selector, and a UI sound mute. Everything updates live.
  • What happens when you complete a task? You decide! It can stay, sink, unpin, or delete. 

🔧 Getting started

1. Install the required mod: LibGUI from the mod DB (hard dependency — don't skip this).
2. In game, craft the Lectern or Notebook:
   
   
   A feather, parchment, leather, nails, a bowl with 1 L of black dye, up to 4 planks. The bowl is consumed. Any plank type and any metal nails work.
3. Open the Notebook. Place the Lectern. Right-click to read.
4. Use the navigation buttons on the right to switch views. Go to Edit and create your first Task. 
5. Hover a task row → click the pin icon → task appears on your HUD immediately.

For keyboard shortcuts, completion policies, and the full settings reference, see the Scribe wiki on GitHub.

📌 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 chosen libGUI theme. (Scribe is optimized for the pixel art)
• Pixel Art Size — the Lectern window width. Scales the whole layout live.
• Task & HUD font & font-size — 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.

🗺️ Roadmap

The Lectern is just the first tier. The plan is for note-taking tools to grow with your tech tree — scratchy clay in the stone age, paper and parchment later, shared boards for multiplayer.

• ✅ v0.1 — Lectern + Pinned HUD (released) — The first task management block. Allows pinning tasks to the HUD. 
• ✅ v0.2 — Notebook & Clockmaker's Notebook — carried items for task management on-the-go! Clockmaker's variant adds timers.
• ⬜ v0.3 — Clay & Wax Tablets — early-game handheld tablets grounded in real archaeology.
• ⬜ v0.4 — Writing Desk — an organizer block with search/filter capabilities, task-assignment, and enables mass copy/pasting across items and blocks.

📚 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+ (it may work on other versions, it's untested)
• LibGUI (gui) developed for 2.0.0 and 3.1.0 — required on both client and server. Check our changelog for specific version download guidance. 

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

💬 Credits & thanks

• LibGUI by ripls — the UI framework that powers Scribe's interface. Saved an enormous amount of work.
• Atlas by Pixnop — a headless VS server test harness that made integration testing actually possible.
• Artekuno — suggested the Scapholène font & to toggle the mod's audio

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