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* taps can be attached to trees to extract saps, syrups, and resins from under the bark; these can be caught by placing a trough below. you can then fill bottles from the trough, or simply pick the whole trough up and bring it home to deposit the liquid in a keg for later use.
* you can build a lathe for complex metal- and woodworking, to build things like pipes, screws, discs, and fenceposts.
* wands, made at an **Wandworking Station** out of a wood, gems, bands, and cores, can be enchanted by soaking them in philters, special potions used for imbuing wood with ley-force (though i'm trying to come up with a better mechanism). these fire off powerful spells with a flick of the wrist, but will break when they run out of power (unless you recharge them…)
* if you want to get into advanced arcanism, you can build an **Enchanter**. if you have the proper wands with the proper wands, this powerful artifact can be used to imbue tools with useful supernatural properties, though what enchantments are available and how much ley-charge a tool can hold depend on what metal the tool is made of. but Enchanters can be used for more subtle purposes as well. with the right ingredients and a **Divination Wand**, you can conjure up recipes for delicacies or schematics for powerful magitech devices you never imagined were possible. **Melding Wands** can merge the mystic essences of items on an Enchanter to create something new, including some things that can't be made any other way, though the stars may need to be right (an **Astrolabe** can help you check) for certain recipes to work, and some may come down to plain old luck. **Division Wands** are very similar, but work the other way around.
* if you do a wide variety of things with your enchanter, you may want to build a **Wand Rack** in your lab, otherwise a **Wand Stand** or two will probably be good enough.
* you can also build a **Disassembly Kit**, which you can use with pen, ink, and paper to create schematics for any object you come across that you want to be able to craft yourself.
* you can collect your assorted recipes into cookbooks, and you can build yourself a **Writing Stand** to insert, delete, re-order, or (if you have some Scissors handy) cut out parts of the book.
* you can make a **Mill** for grinding up solid materials into powder or pulp. it makes flour from grain more efficiently than a mortar and pestle, can produce various metal powders of great utility, and can reduce books, paper, and punchcards down to a pulp, suitable for cleaning with **Erasure Fluid** and cooking back into clean paper. but you'll need some way to power it. a **Generator** will produce plenty of energy in a pinch, but it may be more rewarding to build yourself a real power grid, carrying current from place to place using cables (**Vidrium Cables** are sufficient for homes and studios, but industrial facilities may need **Iridium Cables** or the even more conductive **Conduit**). **Mese Blocks** always emit a small but constant amount of ley-current, but if you're near a strong leyline, building **Condenser**s to harvest its power will be much more efficient. (**Leyspark Wand**s are crucial tools for testing the source and affinity of the ambient leyscape.)
* some new alloys can be made by sintering metal powders; others need to be melted down in a **Smelter**. these alloys have the most remarkable properties of any metal, and are especially valued by toolsmiths and enchanters, though they may be less broadly useful than the lesser metals.
* if you need to travel quickly between two distant places, and you're wealthy enough to afford it, you can build yourself one of the most powerful and complex of magitech devices — the **Teleporter**. it's no mean feat: even the smallest teleporter requires a teleport pad with a reflector above it and a portal node connected to one or the other. the teleporter will then need to be connected to its destination with cables or conduits, and if where you're travelling is very far away, you'll have to build two separate ley nets and bridge them by using an **Attunement Wand** on a pair of **Raycasters** — or perhaps even **Farcasters**. the power required to operate all of these devices is not trivial, and while a Farcaster's signal can pierce through any substance and cross any distance to reach its destination, the farther away each is from the other, the more power each side will consume. and casters can't send current, they can only send signals, so you may need a sizable power plant on both sides of the portal.
* if all you need to do is send small items, of course, a **Displacer** is much cheaper, and more flexible. if you're feeling particularly ambitious, you could use a Displacer net to connect your whole kingdom with instantaneous package service.
* stop your foes in their tracks by flipping a switch to turn on your **Force Field Emitters**, generating an impenetrable barrier wherever they aim.
* who needs elevators when you have **Gravitators**? float gently up a vast borehole, bring attackers crashing down to earth, or slow a fatal plunge to a soft and easy landing.
* build graven **Idols** to your gods and set sacrifices to them upon an altar. if they're feeling generous, they might start sending you presents of their own, or consecrating your offerings. but beware: different gods have different tastes (and different powers), and get bored quickly with repetitive offerings.
* to bend the ultimate arcane forces of the cosmos to your will, you'll need a **Rune Forge**. with a strong ley-current and a steady supply of **Phials** from an Infuser, a Rune Forge will crystallize thaumic impurities into Runes that can you can imbue into a gemstone **Amulet** with a **Rune Wrench**. each amulet can only be used once before it loses its charge, and it may be a long time before the same kind of rune happens to coalesce in your forge again, but the spells they unleash are unique and priceless boons — or weapons. teleport without a teleporter! purge your environs of all spellcraft no matter how fearsomely potent! surround yourself with a shimmering Disjunction Field that, for a short while, will snuff out any spell it touches and, rendering enemy mages utterly helpless and piercing otherwise impenetrable defenses! stride through solid stone like open air! carve huge tunnels deep into the rock with only a snap of your fingers! rain obliteration down upon a target of your choosing! send forth a titanic bolt of flame with the power to blast open mountainsides! tear the very life force straight from an enemy's body and use it to fortify your being! all this and more can be done with the power of rune magic.
there's more as well. users are intended to discover recipes through trade with others, but if you're playing in singleplayer or you're the first person on a new server, that won't work. if you feel like cheating, you can enable the MTG Craftguide or read the Sorcery source code (and there's some recipes on the wiki) but the "correct" way of gaining new recipes is through worship. you can find instructions for building idols and altars in "lore.md".
# lore
`sorcery` supplies a default system of lore (that is, the arbitrary objects that the basic principles of the setting operate over) but this can be augmented or replaced on a per-world basis. for instance, you can substitute your own gods for the Harvest Goddess, Blood God, change their names, and so on, or simply make your own additions to the pantheon. since lore overrides are stored outside the minetest tree, it can be updated without destroying your changes.
lore is stored separately from the rest of the game logic, in the 'data' directory of the `sorcery` mod. it is arranged in a hierarchy of thematically-organized tables. for instance, the table of gods can be found in `data/gods.lua`. ideally, lore tables should contain plain data, though they can also contain lambdas if necessary. lore files are evaluated in the second stage of the init process, after library code has been loaded but before any game logic has been instantiated. lore can thus depend on libraries where reasonable (though e.g. colors should be stored as 3-tuples rather than `sorcery.lib.color` objects, and images as texture strings, unless there is a very good reason to do otherwise).
lore files should never depend on functions in the `minetest` or `core` namespace! if you really need such functionality, gate it off with an if statement and be sure to return something useful in the event that the namespace isn't defined. *lore is just data:* as a general principle, non-minetest code should be able to evaluate and make use of the lore files, for instance to produce an HTML file tabulating the various potions and how to create them. lore should also not mutate the global environment: while there is currently nothing preventing it from doing so, steps will likely be taken in the future to give each lore module a clean environment to keep it from contaminating the global namespace. right now, all functions and variables declared in a lore file should be defined `local`. the only job of a lore file is to return a table.
`sorcery` looks in a directory called `sorcery` in the world-data directory for world-specific lore and other overrides. below are three example lore modifications to give you a sense for how this system works.
## replacing the gods
this is probably the most common action you'll want to take -- if your world has its own defined setting and already has its own gods, or you just want to give it a bit of a local flavor, you probably won't want the default pantheon that `sorcery` comes with.
to do this, we'll need to create a file called `$world/sorcery/lore-gods.lua` where $world is the world's root data directory, e.g. `/srv/mt/geographica`
```
-- /srv/mt/geographica/sorcery/lore-gods.lua
return {
fire = {
name = 'Aduram the Scorching';
................................................................................
‹···›
};
}
```
when you define gods, be mindful of the personality you wish to create and worship practices you wish to provoke. how attentive must their worshippers be to maintain a useful relationship? how often are sacrifices required? how many sacrifices are necessary before the god will start performing miracles? it's easy to make gods completely overpowered gamebreakers, so be cautious, and don't gift anything terribly valuable -- or if you do, give it very rarely.
note that you would also need to supply idol models called `sorcery-idol-fire.obj` and `sorcery-idol-water.obj`. gods with the ids `harvest` or `blood` will use predefined idols.
## adding gods
if you're happy with the default pantheon, but your spiritual life just isn't complete without the fiery rage of Aduram, you can change the name of `sorcery/lore-gods.lua` to `sorcery/lore-gods-extra.lua`. this way, the table it returns will be merged preferentially into the table of default gods.
## modifying gods
more complex operations can also be performed. let's say the Blood God is ruining your vibe and you want to delete him (her? it?) from the pantheon. or the Harvest Goddess needs a name more in line with your local cosmology. these are both easy:
................................................................................
-- /srv/mt/geographica/sorcery/lore-gods.lua
local gods = ...
gods.harvest.name = 'Disastra bel-Malphegor'
gods.blood = nil
return gods
```
this has the handy property that any changes made upstream to the Harvest Goddess will be respected if you update the mod, without overriding the changes made in lore-gods.lua.
or, if you want to extract a specific god from the default pantheon and include it with your own:
```
-- /srv/mt/geographica/sorcery/lore-gods.lua
local gods = ...
local mygods = dofile('my-pantheon.lua')
|
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* taps can be attached to trees to extract saps, syrups, and resins from under the bark; these can be caught by placing a trough below. you can then fill bottles from the trough, or simply pick the whole trough up and bring it home to deposit the liquid in a keg for later use.
* you can build a lathe for complex metal- and woodworking, to build things like pipes, screws, discs, and fenceposts.
* wands, made at an **Wandworking Station** out of a wood, gems, bands, and cores, can be enchanted by soaking them in philters, special potions used for imbuing wood with ley-force (though i'm trying to come up with a better mechanism). these fire off powerful spells with a flick of the wrist, but will break when they run out of power (unless you recharge them…)
* if you want to get into advanced arcanism, you can build an **Enchanter**. if you have the proper wands with the proper wands, this powerful artifact can be used to imbue tools with useful supernatural properties, though what enchantments are available and how much ley-charge a tool can hold depend on what metal the tool is made of. but Enchanters can be used for more subtle purposes as well. with the right ingredients and a **Divination Wand**, you can conjure up recipes for delicacies or schematics for powerful magitech devices you never imagined were possible. **Melding Wands** can merge the mystic essences of items on an Enchanter to create something new, including some things that can't be made any other way, though the stars may need to be right (an **Astrolabe** can help you check) for certain recipes to work, and some may come down to plain old luck. **Division Wands** are very similar, but work the other way around.
* if you do a wide variety of things with your enchanter, you may want to build a **Wand Rack** in your lab, otherwise a **Wand Stand** or two will probably be good enough.
* you can also build a **Disassembly Kit**, which you can use with pen, ink, and paper to create schematics for any object you come across that you want to be able to craft yourself.
* you can collect your assorted recipes into cookbooks, and you can build yourself a **Writing Stand** to insert, delete, re-order, or (if you have some Scissors handy) cut out parts of the book.
* you can make a **Mill** for grinding up solid materials into powder or pulp. it makes flour from grain more efficiently than a mortar and pestle, can produce various metal powders that are used in many recipes, and the roughest of which can be used for intaglio, and can reduce books, paper, and punchcards down to a pulp, suitable for cleaning with **Erasure Fluid** and cooking back into clean paper. one of the Mill's most useful qualities is its ability to recycle metal; if you have a tool you no longer need, simply grind it back down into powder, then smelt that powder back into metal fragments using a Furnace. but you'll need some way to power it.
* a **Generator** will produce plenty of energy in a pinch, but it may be more rewarding to build yourself a real power grid, carrying current from place to place using cables (**Vidrium Cables** are sufficient for homes and studios, but industrial facilities may need **Iridium Cables** or the even more conductive **Conduit**). **Mese Blocks** always emit a small but constant amount of ley-current, but if you're near a strong leyline, building **Condenser**s to harvest its power will be much more efficient. (**Leyspark Wand**s are crucial tools for testing the source and affinity of the ambient leyscape.)
* a **Lathe** is a indispensable tool for shaping wood, metal, and even gemstones. use a blade to made bars, discs or screws from metal; fenceposts and sticks from wood. a hard metal powder will polish rough gems into stones that can be made into amulets just by attaching a length of silver wire.
* some new alloys can be made by sintering metal powders; others need to be melted down in a **Smelter**. these alloys have the most remarkable properties of any metal, and are especially valued by toolsmiths and enchanters, though they may be less broadly useful than the lesser metals.
* if you need to travel quickly between two distant places, and you're wealthy enough to afford it, you can build yourself one of the most powerful and complex of magitech devices — the **Teleporter**. it's no mean feat: even the smallest teleporter requires a teleport pad with a reflector above it and a portal node connected to one or the other, each a complex and expensive device in its own right. the teleporter will then need to be connected to its destination with cables or conduits, and if where you're travelling is very far away, you'll have to build two separate ley nets and bridge them by using an **Attunement Wand** on a pair of **Raycasters** with a clear line of sight in between — or perhaps even **Farcasters**. the power required to operate all of these devices is not trivial, and while a Farcaster's signal can pierce through any substance and cross any distance to reach its destination, the farther away each is from the other, the more power each side will consume. and casters can't send current, they can only send signals, so you may need a sizable power plant on both sides of the portal. there are ways to teleport that require less expense, power, and infrastructure, but these are suitable for little more than urgent one-way journeys, as they lack the reusability of a portal.
* if all you need to do is send small items, of course, a **Displacer** is much cheaper, and more flexible. if you're feeling particularly ambitious, you could use a Displacer net to connect your whole kingdom with instantaneous package service.
* stop your foes in their tracks by flipping a switch to turn on your **Force Field Emitters**, generating an impenetrable barrier wherever they aim.
* who needs elevators when you have **Gravitators**? float gently up a vast borehole, bring attackers crashing down to earth, or slow a fatal plunge to a soft and easy landing.
* build graven **Idols** to your gods and set sacrifices to them upon an altar. if they're feeling generous, they might start sending you presents of their own, or consecrating your offerings. but beware: different gods have different tastes (and different powers), and get bored quickly with repetitive offerings.
* to bend the ultimate arcane forces of the cosmos to your will, you'll need a **Rune Forge**. with a strong ley-current and a steady supply of **Phials** from an Infuser, a Rune Forge will crystallize thaumic impurities into Runes that can you can imbue into a gemstone **Amulet** with a **Rune Wrench**. each amulet can only be used once before it loses its charge, and it may be a long time before the same kind of rune happens to coalesce in your forge again, but the spells they unleash are unique and priceless boons — or weapons. teleport without a teleporter! purge your environs of all spellcraft no matter how fearsomely potent! surround yourself with a shimmering Disjunction Field that, for a short while, will snuff out any spell it touches and at its most powerful shatter magical equipment outright, rendering enemy mages utterly helpless and piercing otherwise impenetrable defenses! stride through solid stone like open air! carve huge tunnels deep into the rock with only a snap of your fingers! rain obliteration down upon a target of your choosing! send forth a titanic bolt of flame with the power to blast open mountainsides! tear the very life force straight from an enemy's body and use it to fortify your being! all this and more can be done with the power of rune magic.
* **Distillers** can crush herbs and create **Essences** for use in alchemy.
* **Mixing Stands** are crucial for experimenting with different combinations of potions and reagents.
there's more as well. users are intended to discover recipes through trade with others, but if you're playing in singleplayer or you're the first person on a new server, that won't work. if you feel like cheating, you can enable the MTG Craftguide or read the Sorcery source code (and there's some recipes on the wiki) but the "correct" way of gaining new recipes is through worship. you can find instructions for building idols and altars in "lore.md".
# lore
`sorcery` supplies a default system of lore (that is, the arbitrary objects that the basic principles of the setting operate over) but this can be augmented or replaced on a per-world basis. for instance, you can substitute your own gods for the Harvest Goddess, Blood God, and God of Wisdom, change their names, and so on, or simply make your own additions to the pantheon. since lore overrides are stored outside the minetest tree, it can be updated without destroying your changes.
lore is stored separately from the rest of the game logic, in the 'data' directory of the `sorcery` mod. it is arranged in a hierarchy of thematically-organized tables. for instance, the table of gods can be found in `data/gods.lua`. ideally, lore tables should contain plain data, though they can also contain lambdas if necessary. lore files are evaluated in the second stage of the init process, after library code has been loaded but before any game logic has been instantiated. lore can thus depend on libraries where reasonable (though e.g. colors should be stored as 3-tuples rather than `sorcery.lib.color` objects, and images as texture strings, unless there is a very good reason to do otherwise).
lore files should never depend on functions in the `minetest` or `core` namespace! if you really need such functionality, gate it off with an if statement and be sure to return something useful in the event that the namespace isn't defined. *lore is just data:* as a general principle, non-minetest code should be able to evaluate and make use of the lore files, for instance to produce an HTML file tabulating the various potions and how to create them. lore should also not mutate the global environment: while there is currently nothing preventing it from doing so, steps will likely be taken in the future to give each lore module a clean environment to keep it from contaminating the global namespace. right now, all functions and variables declared in a lore file should be defined `local`. the only job of a lore file is to return a table.
`sorcery` looks in a directory called `sorcery` in the world-data directory for world-specific lore and other overrides. below are three example lore modifications to give you a sense for how this system works.
## replacing the gods
this is probably the most common action you'll want to take -- if your world has its own defined setting and already has its own gods, or you just want to give it a bit of a local flavor, you probably won't want the default pantheon that `sorcery` comes with.
to do this, we'll need to create a file called `$world/sorcery/lore-gods.lua` where `$world` is the world's root data directory, e.g. `/srv/mt/geographica`
```
-- /srv/mt/geographica/sorcery/lore-gods.lua
return {
fire = {
name = 'Aduram the Scorching';
................................................................................
‹···›
};
}
```
when you define gods, be mindful of the personality you wish to create and worship practices you wish to provoke. how attentive must their worshippers be to maintain a useful relationship? how often are sacrifices required? how many sacrifices are necessary before the god will start performing miracles? it's easy to make gods completely overpowered gamebreakers, so be cautious, and don't gift anything terribly valuable -- or if you do, give it very rarely.
note that you would also need to supply idol models called `sorcery-idol-fire.obj` and `sorcery-idol-water.obj`. gods with the ids `harvest`, `magic`, or `blood` will use predefined idols.
## adding gods
if you're happy with the default pantheon, but your spiritual life just isn't complete without the fiery rage of Aduram, you can change the name of `sorcery/lore-gods.lua` to `sorcery/lore-gods-extra.lua`. this way, the table it returns will be merged preferentially into the table of default gods.
## modifying gods
more complex operations can also be performed. let's say the Blood God is ruining your vibe and you want to delete him (her? it?) from the pantheon. or the Harvest Goddess needs a name more in line with your local cosmology. these are both easy:
................................................................................
-- /srv/mt/geographica/sorcery/lore-gods.lua
local gods = ...
gods.harvest.name = 'Disastra bel-Malphegor'
gods.blood = nil
return gods
```
this has the handy property that any changes made upstream to the Harvest Goddess will be respected if you update the mod, without overriding the changes made in `lore-gods.lua`.
or, if you want to extract a specific god from the default pantheon and include it with your own:
```
-- /srv/mt/geographica/sorcery/lore-gods.lua
local gods = ...
local mygods = dofile('my-pantheon.lua')
|