Stones

Experience your Destiny. Your Skill Tree, Built in Stone.

Stones is a progression mod built around Minecraft's vanilla experience (XP) system. Instead of spending experience exclusively on enchanting, players discover ancient Stones throughout the world and socket magical runes into them.

Each bound Stone becomes a permanent, physical progression hub. While you manage your build through a dedicated menu when interacting with the Stone, your character's progression is physically stored within the block itself rather than in a traditional, invisible RPG skill tree.

Key Features

Ancient Stones: Discover mysterious monoliths in the Overworld. By binding yourself to a Stone, it becomes your personal progression hub. Each Stone generates a unique socket layout based on your world seed, permanently storing your specific build.

Rune System: Customize your character using a variety of socketable runes. Rune power is determined by enchantments, allowing progression to push past vanilla limits.

Minor Runes: Provide passive bonuses.

Major Runes: Power scales directly with your current XP level.

Milestone Runes: Unlock entirely new active abilities.

Cluster Jewels: Combine multiple runes into a single socket to maximize space.

Active Skills: Abilities are placed on a dedicated action bar next to the hotbar (default: R, G, and V) to avoid keybind clutter. Runes can be swapped directly from your survival inventory, making it easy to switch builds on the fly.

XP-Scaled Progression: Your current XP level actively increases the power of many runes. This rewards players for surviving and hoarding XP, keeping experience valuable without turning progression into a menu of permanent unlocks.

The Echo Trader: A mysterious entity who exchanges XP for runes, vanilla items, and Resonance Boxes. You can also make dangerous bargains, sacrificing your maximum health for massive XP gains. Choose carefully.

Meaningful Death: Death is no longer just a punishment. Your vanilla Death Score is recorded, and long survival runs are rewarded with Resonance Boxes upon respawning. These boxes contain loot from both vanilla Minecraft and installed mods.

Data-Driven Customization: Built with modpacks in mind, nearly every aspect of Stones is data-driven. Creators can add new runes, abilities, and trader offers using simple JSON datapacks via the built-in Stones Studio—no Java knowledge required.

Balancing & Modpack Integration

You are free to include Stones in any CurseForge modpack. Modded Minecraft varies enormously, making universal balancing nearly impossible. The default rune enchantments reflect what felt enjoyable during the developer's own playthroughs and are not intended to be perfectly balanced for every modpack.

Fortunately, almost everything is highly configurable. Pack creators are encouraged to adjust rune values, enchantments, and progression mechanics to fit their specific gameplay experience.

About the Project: Stones is a solo hobby project that evolved from a private survival mod into a public release. It remains in active development. Please do not re-upload the mod to other websites; use the official CurseForge link. You are completely free to use Stones in videos and streams!