Inkbound: A Mystcraft Remake

Inkbound is a worldwriting and exploration mod for Minecraft. Survey the world around you for symbols, write them into a manuscript, bind that manuscript into a book, and step into a brand new dimension that exists because you wrote it.

Floating islands under twin suns. A cavern world lit by resonant crystal. An endless archipelago beneath a violet sky, where the water runs amber and the rain never stops. If you can find the words, you can write it.

If you ever missed Mystcraft, this mod is built for you. Inkbound is an independent spiritual successor with all-new code, art and mechanics. It is not a port.

✒️ Write a world, then walk into it

1. Survey. Right-click blocks with a Surveyor's Quill to turn them into symbol pages. Grass gives you Meadow, stone gives you Rolling Hills, and a copper block gives you a Turning Sky.
2. Write. Arrange pages at the Writing Desk. A live stability readout and conflict checker show what the finished age will be like before you commit.
3. Bind. Take the written manuscript and a Linking Panel to the Book Binder. Add binding resin to steady an ambitious sentence.
4. Travel. Right-click the finished book, place it on a Bookstand, or build a walk-through Threshold portal. Your age is waiting for you.

Each age is a real, persistent dimension. It has its own terrain seed, saved chunks and everything you build there. Two identical sentences still produce two different worlds.

📜 142 symbols to find

Every symbol is a physical page you can collect, store, copy and trade.

• Biomes: ten presets, plus a quill that records any registered biome, including biomes from other mods. Mix up to four using small, large, tiled or scattered layouts.
• Terrain: rolling hills, soaring peaks, archipelagos, floating islands, cavern worlds, void worlds, flat ground, stone spheres, winding tendrils and great trees.
• 22 terrain materials: deepslate, blackstone, end stone, basalt, prismarine, packed ice and more. Hold a glass bottle while surveying to capture solid blocks and fluids from other mods, too.
• Skies: twin suns, large moons, no stars, eternal day, eternal night, violet twilight. Sun, moon, stars, sky, fog, water, foliage and lighting each have their own controls.
• Weather and seas: tempests, endless rain, rainbows, cycling weather, and water, lava, frozen or dry seas.
• Features: villages, strongholds, mineshafts, dungeons, Nether fortresses, obelisks, stone spikes, lakes, buried riches and crystal growth.
• Modifier words that recolour, tint gradients, set celestial orbits and choose which material a feature is built from.

The basics come from surveying the Overworld. The rarest words are in folios hidden in lost archives, ruined libraries scattered across your ages. There are five collections (Archive, Strata, Astral, Verdant and Lexicon), and each one avoids duplicates until you complete it.

⚠️ Write carefully

Push a sentence too far and the world pushes back.

As instability rises, recurring afflictions set in: frailty, sickness and gravity surges. Higher still, you get marked outdoor disasters such as scorching strikes, static and ruptures, each with a warning before it lands. At the top of the scale, terrain decay spreads through the ground itself until you mine it out.

The desk forecasts the danger tier before you write, and the finished book lists the exact hazards. Binding resin lowers the risk. Server owners can turn off terrain decay or every advanced hazard.

📚 Build a library that links everything

• Linking books remember a place. Record your base once and you always have a way home.
• Bookstands turn your hall into a travel hub, and anyone can use them.
• Thresholds are portals you walk through, built in almost any flat frame shape up to 256 blocks inside. Mobs, items, minecarts, boats and mounted passengers travel with you.
• An Ink Mixer brews six linking properties into your books: Following, Intra-linking, Maintain Momentum, Disarming, Generate Platform and Relative.
• Archive Bookshelves hold six books each, with a visible spine for every filled slot, hopper access and a comparator signal.
• A Collation Folder gathers pages automatically, a Symbol Notebook stores and copies 72 of them, and a Symbol Portfolio loads a whole sentence into the desk at once.
• Archivist villagers trade in rare words.

Lost your book in a hostile age? /inkbound home channels a ten-second return to where you came from, and no operator permissions are needed. A Homeward Seal cuts it to five seconds. If you fall out of the bottom of a void world, the ink catches you and brings you home.

📖 You won't need a wiki

New players receive the Inkbound Field Guide, a ten-tab Modonomicon book with 240 entries. It covers a connected tutorial, every symbol, every recipe, the writing rules, the hazards, and illustrated diagrams for surveying, binding and threshold building. It can take you from your first bottle of ink to your hundredth age without a single browser tab.

With JEI installed you also get recipe views for surveying, ink mixing, writing and binding.

🎨 Handcrafted

• Original, hand-placed 16×16 pixel art, with a unique glyph on every symbol page
• Custom models for the writing desk, book binder, tilted brass-bound bookstand and threshold anchor
• An animated threshold surface, sound feedback and eight advancements
• Recipes in the vanilla recipe book for the entire survival path

🖥️ For server owners and pack makers

• Every multiplayer action is validated on the server.
• inkbound-server.toml and inkbound-expansion-server.toml cover the age cap (128 per save by default), threshold size, entity travel, prohibited symbols, material exclusions, repeat costs and hazard toggles.
• Existing ages are never regenerated by an update. New rules only apply to ages bound after the change, so unexplored chunks don't shift under your players.
• Surveyed mod biomes and materials stay safe. If a dependency is removed, that age waits unavailable until it comes back.

Please back up your world before adding or removing any dimension mod. Inkbound saves live in data/inkbound_ages.dat and dimensions/inkbound/age/.

❓ FAQ

Can I import my old Mystcraft worlds? No. Inkbound is a new mod, not a port, and it doesn't claim exact feature parity with Mystcraft.

Does it work with biome mods? Yes. Sneak-use the quill in any registered biome, including biomes added by other mods and datapacks, to record it as a page.

Is it multiplayer-safe? Yes. Every action is validated on the server. Very large public servers haven't been stress-tested yet, so bug reports are welcome.

Shaders? Shader packs and custom biome renderers haven't been compatibility-tested yet. Let us know how it goes.