Ashen Vow

Kindle. Fall. Rise.

A soulslike modpack for Minecraft 1.21.1 / NeoForge.

⚠ Before you install — five files you have to add yourself

Five of this pack's mods have third-party downloads switched off by their authors. CurseForge is not allowed to hand those files to a launcher, so the CurseForge app will pause during installation and ask you to download them yourself. This is not a fault in the pack and there is no way around it from this end — the switch belongs to each mod's author.

It takes about two minutes. Download these five files and drop them into the instance's mods folder:

Take the first two seriously. Smart Items and Mod Compat are what attach Epic Fight movesets to the 500+ weapons this pack is built around. Without them, most of the arsenal swings like a vanilla stick and the pack is not the pack. The other three are worth having but the game will run without them.

On third-party launchers. Prism, MultiMC and ATLauncher usually fail on these files instead of prompting for them. If you use one, fetch the five above by hand before or after import.

Three mods that are not on CurseForge at all

They are not in the pack and the game runs fine without them. Add them from Modrinth if you want what they do:

• Epic Fight × Iron's Spells — casting animations that let you throw spells from inside an Epic Fight stance instead of dropping out of it. The most worthwhile of the three if you intend to play a caster.
• Noisium — faster world generation. Changes nothing you can see.
• Drippy Loading Screen early window — the branded splash that shows before the game window opens. It ships as an extra file on Drippy's own download page, which a modpack manifest cannot reference. Without it you get NeoForge's default early screen for a few seconds. Everything else about the pack's look is unaffected.

What it is

Ashen Vow is built around one idea: combat is the whole game. Everything else in the pack — the loot, the structures, the magic, the quest book — exists to give that combat somewhere to happen and a reason to keep happening.

Epic Fight is the backbone. Weapons have real movesets, attacks have weight and commitment, and you can be staggered, punished and killed by things that would be trivial in vanilla. On top of it sit its addons — Nightfall, Dawn Day, Weapons of Miracles, Progressive Difficulty, and the compat layers that attach movesets to 500+ weapons from Epic Knights, Simply Swords and L_Ender's Cataclysm.

Because of that, the pack deliberately contains no second combat or animation system: no Better Combat, no Combat Roll, no Not Enough Animations, no first-person model mod, and no second stamina bar. Two such systems fight each other on screen.

The loop

• Death is not the end. Your corpse stays where you fell holding every item and all your experience. Walk back and take it. The thing that killed you is still standing there. That walk is the game.
• Waystones are bonfires. They are renamed to bonfires throughout, and the quest book treats them as your checkpoint network. Kindle every one you find.
• The quest book is the map of the pack. 305 quests across 25 chapters in English and Russian, each one pointing at something the pack actually contains, in the order it was meant to be met. It opens with a greeting, then a two-chapter primer that teaches the interface and Epic Fight outright — which key does what, how guard and stamina interact, where the recipes live — and ends with a finale that marks the pack as completed.
• Nothing is left undiscoverable. A build check fails if any installed content mod is neither used nor named in the book, so every mod in the pack has somewhere that points you at it.

What's in it

Shaders

Four shader packs ship with the pack but are off by default — a soulslike that stutters is not atmospheric. Turn one on in Video Settings → Shader Packs:

• Complementary Unbound — the default recommendation
• Photon — heavier, more cinematic
• Rethinking Voxels — voxel lighting, excellent in torch-lit dungeons
• MakeUp Ultra Fast — for weaker machines

Ambient light is deliberately low (gamma 0.35). Carry torches.

Credits

This pack ships third-party resource and shader packs under their licenses.

Shader packs

• Complementary Shaders — Unbound by EminGT — redistributed inside this modpack under the Complementary license, which permits modpack inclusion with visible credit. Any problems arising from its use here are the responsibility of this modpack's author, not EminGT. https://modrinth.com/shader/complementary-unbound
• Photon Shaders by SixthSurge — https://modrinth.com/shader/photon-shader
• Rethinking Voxels by gri573 — https://modrinth.com/shader/rethinking-voxels
• MakeUp — Ultra Fast Shaders by Lonewolf — LGPL-3.0-or-later — https://modrinth.com/shader/makeup-ultra-fast-shaders

Resource packs

• Soulsborne Fog Wall World Border — CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://modrinth.com/resourcepack/soulsborne-fog-wall-world-border
• Better Leaves — MIT — https://modrinth.com/resourcepack/better-leaves
• Medieval Melodies — LGPL-3.0-only — https://modrinth.com/resourcepack/medieval-melodies

Mods — every mod is installed unmodified from its author's published release. The full list with authors and versions is in modlist.html inside the pack.

Pack art — the title-screen panorama, wordmark, loading screens, button skin, pack icon and all twenty-five quest-chapter banners were generated procedurally for this pack and contain no third-party image assets.