Null Compass

Three compasses, and a landmark worth building.

A magnetic compass always finds north. A relative compass points back to a temporal beacon you have attuned it to. An origin compass points to where the world began, and never needs attuning.

The temporal beacon is the landmark the relative compass answers to — a block you build, name, and share. A few people can bind their spawn to it, and its builder can lift it and carry it somewhere better. Set a compass down and it lies open with its case squared to north, so a room can have a compass on the table.

A needle gives you a bearing and nothing else. No coordinates ever leave the server for these items — the compass knows which way, never where. That holds for every compass and every beacon in the mod.

Crafting

• Magnetic compass — clear quartz, copper bits, metal scraps, copper plate
• Relative compass — clear quartz, copper bits, a temporal gear, brass plate
• Origin compass — two temporal gears, clear quartz, copper bits, iron plate
• Temporal beacon — cobblestone, copper plates, metal scraps, a temporal gear

Using a beacon

Hold use on a beacon with a relative compass to attune it. Hold use without one to take a spawn slot, if the beacon has one free. Open the beacon to rename it, give up your slot, or decide whether slot holders may lift it. A newly placed beacon settles before its spawn slots bind.

Plays well with

Built for a server that has taken the map away, and it pairs with Null Lockdown and Null Cartography — but it does not require either. With Null Lockdown installed, a beacon announces itself to the spawn lockdown so a server that forbids every other way of setting a spawn still lets a beacon slot through. Without it, nothing changes and the beacon behaves the same.

About this mod

Built for Null Ossuary — a small community that runs its own game servers. This mod was written for our own Vintage Story world, ran there with players on it before it was published, and is free for anyone's server or singleplayer game.

Found a bug, or want to argue with a design decision? Every mod has its own board on our forums: nossuary.com/forums. The community, the servers and the rest of the Null mods are at nossuary.com, and the Discord is linked from there.

 

AI disclosure. This mod was built with help from an AI coding assistant. The design, the gameplay decisions, and every choice about what the mod should do are mine; the AI wrote and revised code, tests and documentation under direction and was reviewed before anything shipped. Bug reports and feedback are read and acted on by me.