Lostway

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Dante, Inferno I (translated by H. W. Longfellow)

Lostway adds a dark forest to the Overworld. It's rare, about as rare as a jungle, and it's made of five woodland biomes that always grow together. Go in deep enough and you'll lose your way. Your compass spins, the arrow on your map stops making sense and the fog closes in behind you.

The woods

• Deep Wood. Giant gloomwood trees with roots like walls. Almost no light reaches the ground.
• Bramble Thicket. Thorny bushes everywhere. They scratch you if you walk through them, but the blackberries are worth it.
• Sunlit Glade. The only place where the sun gets in. Golden grass, flower bushes and a beam of light full of dust.
• Misty Hollow. Low valleys of weeping mistwillows and rushes, where the fog is thicker than anywhere else.
• Mire Wood. Dead gnarlwood oaks standing in brown water, cattails, duckweed and gas bubbling up from the mud.

Three new wood types, each with the full set: logs, planks, stairs, slabs, fences, doors, trapdoors, signs, hanging signs, boats and chest boats. Plus moss, leaf litter, ferns, clover, shelf fungi, pale toadstools and glowcaps.

The three beasts

Each one has a lair somewhere in its own biome. They're tough, and they don't fight fair.

• The Lonza hides in the brambles. It stalks you, pounces, and when it's hurt it vanishes into the thorns and waits for you to come close.
• The Lion sleeps on a rock in the sunlit glades. It roars you off your feet, charges, and leaps on you from eight blocks away.
• The She-Wolf lives in the misty hollows and she can't be killed. She steals the food from your hotbar and eats it to heal. Halfway through the fight she changes. Beat her down and she runs into the fog, and a few days later she's back.

Each beast drops something you won't find anywhere else: the Apple of Temptation, the Lonza Boots, the Lion Crown and the She-Wolf Pelt, which keeps monsters from noticing you in the woods.

The sunlit hill

Somewhere near the woods there's a hill where it's always dawn. You can see its pink and gold glow from deep in the forest. If you can't find it, craft a Hill Map from paper, golden grass and gloomwood planks and it'll mark the top for you.

At the top there's an old house, and someone is waiting inside. The door stays shut until you've beaten all three beasts. The shrine in front of the house gives you a compass that points to their lairs, and lights up for every beast you defeat.

Who else lives here

Deer, owls, crows, songbirds, butterflies, ducks, snails and boars that defend their piglets. At night, shades come out of the deepest parts of the forest and they don't like light. Bramble spiders leave sticky webs behind. And if a will-o'-the-wisp shows up, you can follow it deeper in. At the end there's either a hidden clearing with a chest, or something waiting for you in the dark.

Requirements

NeoForge 1.21.1, GeckoLib and TerraBlender. Install it on both the client and the server.

Compatibility

I tested it on a dedicated server. If you have Naturalist installed, its deer and boars live in the woods and Lostway's own deer step aside.

Config

In config/lostway-common.toml you can turn the woods off, make them more or less common, and choose whether the F3 screen hides your coordinates while you're lost.

For video makers

Operators can make the beasts act on cue with /lostway act <mob> <action>. The Lion can roar, charge and leap, the She-Wolf can howl, transform and flee, the Lonza can roar, pounce and hide, and all three can sleep and wake. For example: /lostway act @e[type=lostway:lion,limit=1,sort=nearest] roar.

Modpacks

Feel free to put it in your modpack, you don't need to ask.

Credits

Some parts come from other people's open work: flower bushes from Bushier Flowers, the owl from Broglis Owls, songbirds, butterflies, ducks and snails from MoAnimals, the crow from Fowl Play, the lion's base model from Savannah, the lonza's from "Cheetah" by Derp, and the crown from "Minecraft Crown" by Olaf4549. Thank you. The full list is inside the mod.

What's next

Like Greyfall, Lostway is a small piece of something bigger. More is coming.