Dacian Legends

Dacian Legends is a story-driven adventure and exploration mod for Minecraft 1.12.2 (Forge). It adds living Dacian villages and settlements, a quest chain run through a Keeper's Journal, sacred wolf companions, three underground, ground-level and sky-level structures to explore, three boss fights with their own mechanics, and a large set of new weapons, tools, armour, shields, creatures, blocks and textures. Everything is original fantasy inspired by Dacian history: the names, creatures and places are a game interpretation, not a claim about attested myth.

You arrive as a stranger. You make yourself useful to a village, then follow its missing people and relics into burial crypts, ruined hillforts and finally a sky sanctuary. Everything is explained in game by the Keeper's Journal (your personal quest log, with directions to the next place to visit) and the Dacian Codex (an in-game encyclopedia of every item, creature, quest and structure).

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.12.2, Forge 14.23.5.2859 (or a newer 1.12.2 build), Java 8.
• No other mod is required. Xaero's Minimap and World Map are supported but optional.

Getting started

1. Install Forge for 1.12.2 and put the mod jar in your mods folder.
2. Create a new world, or explore new chunks in an existing one. Keep Generate Structures turned on.
3. Find a Dacian village. Operators can use /locate DacianVillage.
4. Right-click the Keeper villager, accept the first commission and ask for the Keeper's Journal. Right-click the journal at any time to see your progress and the coordinates of your next destination.

Other locate targets: ForestVillage, HillSettlement, CourierWatchpost, BurialCairn, Hillfort, SkySanctuary.

The quest chain

The campaign has twelve story quests plus optional commissions. Progress is saved per player.

1. A Place at the Fire: bring the Keeper 12 bread or 16 planks.
2. Voices on the Road: defeat three Restless Ancestors.
3. Names in Stone: offer ancestral fragments at the village Memorial Stone.
4. The Missing Courier: recover a satchel from a courier watchpost. This unlocks Smith commissions.
5. Iron for the Living: show the Keeper a Dacian weapon or shield.
6. The Sealed Cairn and The Cairn Warden: go underground, record a funerary seal, and defeat the first boss to earn your Memory seal.
7. The Silent Grove: help a Hunter cleanse a spirit den and earn the right to bond with a Sacred Wolf.
8. The Lost Standard: recover a standard's cloth from a ruined hillfort.
9. The Broken Oath: defeat the Oathbreaker Captain for your Oath seal.
10. An Offering to the Sky and The Unanswered Sky: restore three pillars of a sky sanctuary, make a storm offering and defeat the Storm Guardian. A Keeper then closes the pact.

Each seal and reward is personal, so players who join later can still progress at their own pace on the same world.

Villages and people

• Three settlement types: a standard village, a forest village with a palisade and a sacred wolf grove, and a terraced hill settlement. Buildings are levelled individually and the land between slopes naturally, so villages follow the terrain instead of flattening it. Desert, badlands, savanna, jungle, swamp and snow villages use matching materials.
• Six professions that are not vanilla villagers: the Keeper (quests, journal), Smith (equipment commissions, repairs), Hunter (den cleansing, wolf bonding, daily spirit patrols, trail rumours), Healer (heals once a day, takes herbs), Farmer (trades produce) and Guardian (starts optional defence events).
• Soldiers in barracks and courier watchposts, livestock pens, irrigated wheat and silk hemp fields, and chests stocked with farm goods, tools, iron and seeds.
• Defence events are optional and bounded: three waves, attackers never break blocks or kill residents, and failing only costs a short rest.
• Trust: a single score of 0-100 shared by all Dacian settlements. Story quests give enough to finish the campaign; repeat commissions add at most 6 per day.

Structures

• Burial cairns: sealed underground crypt-arenas (one per dry biome type) with graves, stone pillars, tiered seating and a reliquary. Home of the Cairn Warden.
• Ruined hillforts: a 31x31 stone fort with a curtain wall, four hollow towers, a ruined barracks, a collapsed hall, a courtyard arena around the Oath Altar and an oath chamber with the Sanctuary altar. Garrisoned by Oathbreakers.
• Sky sanctuaries: a stone platform raised six blocks on a pedestal, reached by a south stair, with a weathered ring wall, three broken marked pillars and the Storm Altar. Two Storm Wisps keep watch.
• Courier watchposts: small timber stockades with a lookout, a guard and a chest holding a courier's satchel.

Structures are placed deterministically, avoid water, check for natural ground, and never overwrite your own builds. Hillforts and sky sanctuaries are rare by design; their spacing is configurable.

Boss fights

Up to four players can share each fight (health scales +45% per extra player). Only enrolled players inside the arena earn first-clear credit, and every boss can be rematched.

• Cairn Warden (120 health): a stone sweep with a visible wind-up, a marked ground strike, and a 2-second recovery after a missed strike. Calls Restless Ancestors at 65% and Ancient Archers at 30%.
• Oathbreaker Captain (180 health): a guarded advance that stops frontal hits and turns slowly, a warned three-cut sequence of 4 damage each, a warned straight charge, and a rally of two Oathbreakers at 60% and 25%. Flank it, use a fully charged falx cut, or strike during its recovery.
• Storm Guardian (260 health): marked storm strikes you step out of; from 65% an expanding ground ring you jump or hide from behind a pillar; below 30% volleys of slow bolts (blocked by walls and pillars, absorbed by shields) with long recovery windows and up to three Storm Wisps. It never creates fire, weather or block damage.

Creatures

• Restless Ancestor (26 health) and Ancient Archer: hostile spirits that spawn in dark places in the Overworld and ignore sunlight. They drop no vanilla items.
• Oathbreaker (32 health): a shield-bearing warrior. Its shield stops most frontal hits and lowers after each swing; a fully charged falx cut opens it. Drops ancestral fragments.
• Storm Wisp (12 health): a drifting storm spirit that gathers a visible charge, fires one slow bolt, and can only be hurt for a short glowing window afterwards.
• Sacred Wolf (24 health): a neutral forest wolf. After a den commission you can bond with one by offering raw meat; it follows, stays or goes passive on right-click, and never has to be fought.
• Wild Boar (16 health): shy, makes a single short charge if hurt. Drops Raw Boar Steak, which smelts into Cooked Boar Steak.

Weapons, tools, armour and shields

• Falx (7 damage, 1.2 speed, sweeps, a fully charged hit breaks a raised guard), Sica (4 damage, 2.2 speed, short reach), Dacian Spear (5 damage, 1.3 speed, extra knockback on a charged thrust) and Hunter's Bow (reaches full draw 20% sooner). No weapon is best against everything.
• Iron-tier Dacian pickaxe, axe, shovel and hoe.
• Draco Shield (336 durability) and Ironwood Shield (480 durability, a little slower while raised).
• Four armour sets: Dacian (iron and bronze, 19 protection), Wolf Guard (full set: a short speed boost after a shield block), Ancestral (diamond-level) and Sanctuary Keeper (21 protection, toughness 2; full set takes 15% less damage from the mod's spirits).
• Consecrated tools: at the Sanctuary altar a Dacian tool gains +15% speed on its own material, or the hoe tills free every fourth use. Enchantments, name and damage are kept.
• Endgame gear from Storm cores (one per boss victory, rematches included): Storm Falx, Sky Spear and the Stormguard Shield, with small powers against the mod's spirits that share one 8-second cooldown.
• Silk hemp (a fibre crop that grows wild on grass and is farmed in villages; jumping on it flattens it) replaces leather, and tool handles (five silk hemp around a stick) replace sticks in the mod's recipes.

Other features

• Dacian Codex: an in-game book documenting every item, creature, quest, structure and achievement. New players receive one.
• Village wards: after the story ends, a Keeper can light a ward for each village. No spirit of the mod spawns naturally within 24 blocks of it.
• About 50 items (with the armour pieces), 7 custom blocks, 16 creatures with spawn eggs, custom sounds with subtitles, and a story advancement chain.
• Xaero's Minimap face icons for every creature, with no name tags.
• A debug menu (default key K) for testers, with live readout and mob spawners in single-player worlds with cheats.

Configuration

config/dacia.cfg controls structure generation and spacing (villages, watchposts, cairns, hillforts, sky sanctuaries), village variants, natural spawn weights for ancestors and archers, wolf and boar weights, the number of wolves you can bond, defence events, and whether the endgame weapon effects work against other players (off by default).

Multiplayer

Quest progress, seals and rewards are per player. Villages and boss sites belong to the world, so an advanced crafting service still checks each player's own progress. A boss fight locks its roster at the start; late arrivals may help but do not get first-clear credit unless they enrolled. Leaving or dying does not reset the fight while another participant remains.

Compatibility and known limits

• Alpha software: expect rough edges and balance changes between versions.
• Structures generate in newly generated terrain. Existing worlds keep their saves, and quest progress carries over.
• Only about one candidate in a dozen survives the water and slope rules for hillforts and sky sanctuaries, so they are rare. Use /locate or lower the spacing in the config.
• The two watch wisps at a sky sanctuary and the four hillfort Oathbreakers do not respawn once defeated.

Reporting problems

Please include the mod version, the world seed, and your latest.log (or crash report). Screenshots help a lot for texture and structure problems.