Mortals & Gods - Build Your Own Pantheon!

Source & full guide: github.com/teamdemivfxfish-dev/mortals-and-gods-wiki

Raise an altar, found a religion, and earn the favor of gods you design yourself.

Mortals & Gods turns faith into a living, in-world system. Stack ore beneath an Altar Lectern to raise an Altar, wall it into a Sanctum, then open a full-screen worship screen to venerate a pantheon you control. Pledge to a god and its boons grow along a devotion curve; neglect the faith and that power quietly fades. Faith is a habit, not a purchase.

Every god, every power, every currency, and every picture is data-driven. Out of the box it ships a complete, ready-to-play pantheon with its own art and lore, so you can just play. Underneath, it is a toolkit for building pantheons of your own in plain JSON, with no code and no crashes.

Worship, Made Physical

• Build an Altar: an Altar Lectern (Lectern + Book + Gold Ingot) standing on a 3x3 platform of ore blocks, sealed inside an enclosed room called the Sanctum.
• No structures to hunt down. You build the temple yourself and it arms on the spot. Right-click the lectern to worship, and if it is not armed it tells you exactly which condition is missing.
• Stuck? /mortalsgods altar check walks every condition and names the one that failed.
• A richer temple worships harder. Altar tier (1 to 4) is an offering multiplier set by the total value of the ore blocks adorning the Sanctum, so a golden shrine beats a grindy pyramid.
• A consecrated Sanctum breathes: gentle holy light motes and a faint chime, denser at higher tier (and switch-off-able in the config).
• Press B inside an armed Sanctum and your character kneels in prayer at the altar while the screen is open.
• The altar block is yours to choose. What arms an altar is the block tag #mortalsgods:altar_blocks, so a datapack can add whatever it likes. Enchanting tables still work by default, which keeps altars built on older versions standing; set acceptEnchantingTable = false to require the Lectern instead.
• Which blocks adorn a temple, and what each is worth, is the templeBlockValues list, so a modded storage block drops straight in (create:zinc_block=3). sanctumMaxVolume sets how big a cathedral may be.

A Pantheon You Control

• Open a god's page to see its devotion, its patience (how long it will wait before that devotion starts to fade), its offering cost and its boons, with the creed underneath. Pledge with a click, and the button can read a custom verb such as "Bleed for Sanguinar".
• Gods sit in groups of opposed pairs. Within a pair you may follow only one god at a time; switching sides burns your old devotion, because the opposites are jealous.
• Currencies your way: hand over an item (an exact one or a whole item tag), spend XP levels, hunt a kind of creature, or earn devotion by slaying rival worshippers. A god may ask for several at once, and you can decide whether it wants all of them or any one of them.
• Pick from a fixed, unbreakable menu of boons (any attribute at all, including modded ones, plus auto-revive, crafted durability, potion effects, favor theft on kill, and a live scoreboard output) and just fill in the numbers.
• Every boon climbs a saturating devotion curve and decays when you stop worshipping. The cadence is measured in ticks of server uptime, so it cannot be skipped by sleeping or rewound with /time set, and any god may override the global timing with its own.
• A god fed only by blood is never stamped by an offering, so it does not decay at all and its page reads steady rather than showing a bar it can never lose. Switch on killsCountAsWorship and a qualifying kill postpones decay exactly as an offering does.

Living Rulers (Demi-Gods)

• A Demi-Gods tab lets a living player be worshipped as an Emperor rather than a myth.
• The balance of devotion for and against him, loyalists' worship minus rejecters', across every player, scales the crowned ruler's body through Health, Strength, Speed and Reach. Hunt his loyalists hard enough and he physically shrinks until he can be killed.
• Set who may wear the crown in the config, or crown one with /mortalsgods emperor set <player>.

For Pack Makers

Mortals & Gods is built to be reshaped. The gods themselves (names, lore, colors, currencies, boons, and art) live in config/mortalsgods/pantheon.json, generated with the Warborn Realms defaults on first run alongside a README, an images/ folder, and an optional lore.txt. Define an entirely new pantheon, or several, without touching the code.

• Any number of gods and groups: the screen wraps and scrolls, so nothing ever runs off-screen.
• Custom tabs: any tab id on a group becomes a bookmark. A top-level tabs array controls order, labels, and gating (Greek, Egyptian, Norse). The Lore bookmark is always pinned last.
• Exclusive "one pantheon" tabs ("exclusive": true): a player may follow several gods inside one exclusive tab but cannot pledge to a second at the same time (Greek OR Egyptian, not both). /mortalsgods renounce releases those pledges so they can switch.
• Access gates ("require": { ... }): lock a tab, group, or single god behind scoreboard tags (tag, allTags, anyTags, noneTags) and objective scores. Failed entries are hidden server-side and cannot be worshipped even by a modified client, so quests and datapacks decide who may worship what.
• Custom god pictures: drop a 200x380 PNG into config/mortalsgods/images/ named after a god's id, or point a god's art field at a filename.
• Custom lore: write your world's story into config/mortalsgods/lore.txt, where # lines are headings and other lines are paragraphs.
• Scoreboard boon: wire a god's live devotion into a scoreboard objective for functions / KubeJS to read; the objective is created and zeroed automatically, and it stays hidden from the worship screen because it is plumbing rather than scripture. Any boon can be hidden with "hidden": true.
• Who a kill counts against: a kill currency can name rival_followers, non_believers, any_player, or a specific tab:, group: or god:, and can hunt mobs by id or tag instead of players. Any currency may carry a favorMultiplier to weight what it is worth.
• Per-god cadence: cooldownTicks, graceTicks and decayPerPeriod on a single god. A jealous war god can demand attention every few minutes while a patient harvest god forgives a week.
• Fully translatable: every word the worship screen says is a translation key, and items, mobs, attributes and potion effects are named by whatever mod owns them, in each player's own language.

Commands

Reading your own standing is open to everyone. Reading somebody else's, and writing anything, needs an operator.

Anyone with the worship screen open sees a change the moment it lands.

Safe to Edit

You cannot break the game by editing the pantheon. Mistype something and that one entry is skipped with a log warning while the rest keep working. Delete the file to get the default Warborn Realms pantheon back. Server operators apply edits live with /mortalsgods reload, no restart required.

Compatibility

Built for Minecraft 1.21.1 on NeoForge. All integrations are optional soft dependencies, checked at runtime; none are bundled and none are required.

• Pehkui scales the living Emperor's body.
• Iron's Spells 'n Spellbooks is a natural fit for the attribute boon (mana, spell power), though any mod's attributes work.
• War 'n Nobility is a reserved hook for reading the live Emperor's identity.

Support the Mods

These mods are free and they stay free. If one of them runs on your server, you can back the next version, the next port, and the next mod at patreon.com/epicwarborn. Patrons get their name in the credits, a direct line to me for bugs, early builds, and a vote on what gets built next.

Consecrate your Sanctum, design your gods, and let devotion do the rest. Download Mortals & Gods and build your own pantheon today.

Part of The Warborn Realm, by barunn