Apothic Ascension is an endgame progression expansion for Apotheosis on Minecraft 1.21.1 / NeoForge.

This pack's goal is not to replace Apotheosis with a separate RPG system (Obviously, that'd be like trying to replace Ford with a different car, I'm not looking to do that). Ascension takes the systems Apotheosis already establishes- those being rarities, affixes, gems, reforging, salvaging, natural loot and Invader encounters-and extends them into a much longer late-game progression loop for those who love the grind.

If Mythic equipment, Perfect gems and optimized Apotheosis builds have become routine, Ascension gives that progression somewhere further to go.

DISCLAIMER This project is very much a Beta. The core progression loop is playable and actively hardened, but high-end balance is still subject to tuning as real modpack data comes in, modpack makers are very encouraged to include it, as stability and playing nice are architectural pillars of this mod, I will not update it and break your pack for no reason.

Thirteen Rarities Beyond Mythic

Ascension adds thirteen post-Mythic rarities:

Legendary -> Ancient -> Forgotten -> Primal -> Stellar -> Divine -> Esoteric -> Cataclysmic -> Abyssal -> Empyrean -> Paracausal -> Transcendent -> Apotheotic (wow, that's a lot! You probably had to scroll just to see the end, didn't you?)

These are integrated into the existing Apotheosis-style economy rather than existing only as special loot drops, mostly since Apotheosis did it pretty darn good and I'd prefer to leave that stuff to the experts.

Ascension (shorthand for the Apothic Ascension since I'm too lazy to type two entire words) includes progression support for rarity materials, reforging, salvage, natural generation and the dedicated Ascension workstation chain, I didn't wanna make it too boring, but also didn't wanna force players to memorize yet another convoluted magic system (unless you want that, if so let me know and maybe it'll become a thing lol).

The final tiers are intentionally gated behind the Apex endgame rather than allowing the normal workstation path to trivialize the entire ladder, I've played heavily modded apotheosis with a good few addons, I don't want y'all clearing house in a weekend)

Post-Perfect Gem Ascension

Perfect is no longer the end of gem progression.

Ascension adds thirteen grades above Perfect using the same Legendary-to-Apotheotic ladder as equipment. (only a little bit "inspired" by Nadir)

Extended gem grade is stored separately from the underlying Apotheosis gem identity, allowing the original gem, components and bonus semantics to remain intact. If you didn't know Apotheosis uses hard coded gem rarities so the options are either overwrite their system, which is super brittle and prone to causing issues with other mods, or add your own, which is a little less fluid but much more stable)

Gem bonuses are not scaled using one universal multiplier. Attributes, probabilities, cooldowns, durations, protection fractions, drop behavior, radial mining and other bonus families are handled according to their actual domain, with safety ceilings where unrestricted scaling would become invalid or destructive. (During Alpha I saw a good few "execute any enemy below 400% of their max health, which obviously isn't really fair lol)

150 Focused Affixes

High rarity should create more specialized equipment, not simply more tooltip noise. (Don't you love min-maxxing?)

Ascension's native affixes are organized into five (5) focus families:

Attack - direct damage, critical behavior, armor interaction, offensive triggers and pressure effects.

Defense - armor, toughness, health, resistance and defensive reactions.

Agility - movement, attack/draw speed, reach, projectile behavior and mobility.

Sustain - healing, regeneration, life steal, overheal and recovery.

Utility - luck, experience, mining, reach, drop behavior, radial tooling and other non-combat specialization.

Once an Ascension item develops a strong native specialization, later native rolls tend to remain within that focus rather than turning the item into an unrelated pile of bonuses. I would say you're welcome but in all honesty I did it for my own sake.

Stock Apotheosis affixes still participate in generation and remain owned by Apotheosis. (Again I'm not in the business of breaking the core mod)

Staged Progression

Installing Ascension does not immediately allow Apotheotic equipment to rain from ordinary loot.

Each player has a persistent Ascension progression stage:

Locked -> Ascendant -> Celestial -> Esoteric -> Transcendent -> Apotheotic

Natural post-Mythic progression is limited by that stage.

Progression survives death and normal persistence boundaries, with migration support for older Alpha/Beta state where required.

The intent is to make Ascension a progression system rather than merely a larger random-number table, I've played with other addons, and it sucks when I get to the end of apotheosis, install the new one, and instantly get loot at the top of their tables too, who wants to get to mythic just to install more and instantly get Esoteric? It robs you of the grind! (If you don't wanna grind, I really don't think this mod will be your jam)

Dedicated Ascension Workstations

Ascension uses first-party workstations for its core progression loop.

Ascension Forge

Used for rarity-material advancement and Evolution Catalyst crafting.

The Ascension Core is reusable. I might make it take some sort of power source like how a water bucket returns a bucket when used in crafting, but for now its just a static item you can reuse infinitely.

Gem Resonator

Handles post-Perfect gem advancement while preserving the original Apotheosis gem identity and components.

The Gem Ascension Matrix is reusable, just like the Ascension Core.

Affix Loom

Produces Focus Sigils for the five Ascension specialization families:

• Attack
• Defense
• Agility
• Sustain
• Utility

These provide the material foundation for more deliberate specialization and later Ascension systems.

The Apex Ascension Multiblock

The end of the normal workstation chain is the Apex Ascension Bench.

Place an Apex Bench at the center and one Ascension Pylon exactly three blocks north, east, south and west on the same Y level.

A valid structure activates the Apex presentation and unlocks the final progression machinery. (Trust me, you will know when it activates, I strongly suggest using a shader for the best effect)

The Apex system handles the highest-end material/gem advancement and a five-choice pinnacle reforge system.

Later reforge choices sample progressively larger candidate pools and demand progressively greater material, Sigil of Rebirth and experience costs.

The intent is for Transcendent and Apotheotic progression to feel materially different from simply clicking the same upgrade recipe one more time.

Natural Loot and Invaders

Ascension extends natural Apotheosis loot beyond Mythic while respecting the player's current progression ceiling. If its found that we want to take it a step further, I might implement a check that forces players to drop items more than 2 levels above their rarity, or tie items to specific players, just to avoid sharing, unless that's a desired behavior, or maybe I'll leave it to server-side configs, its up to you reading this to leave a comment and let me know your thoughts!

Apotheosis Invaders can participate in the Ascension rarity ladder, and high-end hostile pressure scales with progression. (I mean seriously scales, some of them took me a while to kill while testing in creative, I wound up just using a scoped /kill to get it over with)

Combat scaling is applied in a player-relative manner rather than permanently rewriting a boss for everyone on the server. This is particularly important in multiplayer worlds where players may be at very different Ascension stages, since there's nothing worse than that one sweat friend (no shade to them) making everything have 3x health and do 4x damage while you just got your first uncommon iron gear and get erased trying to loot a pillager outpost.

Extreme endgame damage is also bounded where necessary so the upper boss ladder cannot simply be erased by one pathological burst interaction.

Balance in this area remains an active Beta tuning target.

Compatibility Philosophy

Apothic Ascension tries to extend Apotheosis rather than take ownership of unrelated mod systems.

Beta 11 substantially tightened semantic ownership so unrelated items or rarities are not interpreted as Ascension content simply because another mod happens to use similar internal rarity values.

Optional data-driven integrations currently exist for selected ecosystems such as:

Ars Nouveau
Iron's Spells 'n Spellbooks
Spartan Weaponry Unofficial

These mods are not required to run Ascension.

Broader compatibility precedence--particularly yielding cleanly to dedicated Apotheosis × <other mod> compatibility addons--is planned for further hardening in Beta 12 and potentially 13, though specifics may vary.

Tooltip Compatibility

Ascension only decorates tooltip state it actually owns. (One guy brought it up in the comments and its a very good point that slapping Ascension rarities on everything gets old and useless quick, especially in cases where it causes actual important data to get clobbered)

Ordinary vanilla items and unrelated modded items should not receive Ascension rarity labels. (maybe I'll add a system for it if other devs express a desire to integrate with my mod, but as things stand I doubt it)

Stock Apotheosis rarity presentation remains Apotheosis's responsibility.

Client presentation modes are available for players or pack authors who want less Ascension tooltip decoration:

(woooah fancy table, this guy knows how to use markdown (I had to google it after I forgot to include the separator row) )

Operator Diagnostics

The diagnostic command root is:

/apothic-ascension debug

Diagnostics cover environment, registry ownership, progression stage, rarity tiers, recipes, generated items, boss equipment and combat behavior.

Known Incompatibilities

Nadir

Nadir overlaps the same post-Mythic rarity/progression responsibility and is intentionally incompatible.

Apothic Gem Tiers

This was an older prototype of the post-Perfect gem concept and overlaps Ascension's current gem system. It was never even pushed to CurseForge so I'd be incredibly impressed if you even managed to get the error from them being incompatible.

Beta Expectations

Apothic Ascension is under active development.

The core systems are intended to be usable in real packs, but the top end is deliberately being tuned from actual play rather than pretending that a progression system this large can be perfectly balanced on paper.

Bug reports, compatibility reports and especially examples of unexpectedly weak or overpowered interactions are useful. I'm working on getting a Discord server up for your reports and announcements, stay posted on that.

AI Use Disclosure

This project makes use of generative-AI tooling in portions of development and project artwork.

AI assistance does not and will not replace runtime testing, compatibility qualification or manual review of release candidates. I use actual toolchains and playtesting for that.