Minecraft Forums

I ended up having to replace the speed runes to complete the blood rites for that. I don't know what I was thinking. I ended up killing myself with the sacrificial dagger the first time, lol! Might need to double the height of my fence. There are chickens ALL over my land now. Buggers. Anyway!

I can't seem to make efficiency runes at all, and I know I have the recipe right. Also, I don't understand how to use rituals. You say what they do, but you don't really give a good idea of how to use them. I saw a mod spotlight with rituals in it, but they only showed a few of the more basic ones, and didn't really cover the more advanced ones.

Mainly, the reason I ask is that I need to create a Weak Blood Shard, so I can make Bloodstone Blocks, so's I can upgrade my altar. When you show the recipe for those blocks (in the OP), you don't actually name what's in the recipe, and you don't find out what that mysterious little red item is until you open up the "Armour Creation" spoiler way later on. Even then, it is quite vague in its instruction on actually obtaining a blood shard. It simply redirects you by saying "(See the Ritual of Binding)". And if you look up the Ritual of Binding, it says absolutely nothing about creating blood shards. Are we to activate the binding ritual, and then lead a mob into it? Did you purposely not give specific instruction because you want us to figure it out ourselves? If so, that's totally understandable that you feel there needs to be some mystique involved.

Also, I know you've expressed concerns that your mod is pretty grim, and I personally, want to encourage you to allow it to become even darker. It doesn't have to be gratuitous, but even small things like making the blood in the altar look more like blood and less like pink lemonade would be a great start. Maybe making the rune designs sharper, barb-like. Causing them to light up gold or blood red as the altar becomes closer to filled, and fading to almost invisible as it empties.

Let me preface these suggestions by saying that I know full well that modding is A LOT of work, and what I'm suggesting here is nothing short of A LOT of work. I know you aren't a magician, and expect nothing from you. Just some things to chew on, because I want to see your mod bloom!

I think that utilizing the space at the corners of the 3rd tier altar and up would be a nice way to round out your mod. If you think about it, all the pillars do right now is look really cool. And with all due respect, they do that very well However, it would be really neat if they were interactive, and brought some unique play options to the table.

It would be really cool if, when you upgrade your altar, the cornerstones would have a container of some sort that is required to complete them. For ease, I'll call it "Sanguine Cage". So, say you wanted to hit 3rd tier. Right now, the pillars are *Stone Brick|Stone Brick|Glowstone Block*, but with the Sanguine Cage, the construction would be *Stone Brick|Sanguine Cage|Glowstone Block*, or even *Sanguine Cage|Sanguine Cage|Glowstone Block*. And the cage comes from anointing maybe...a set of iron bars in a second-tier blood altar. Or you could even make it so that you need to anoint 9 sets of iron bars in your altar, which would give you Sanguine Bars, and then craft them in a 3x3 pattern (like any block) to get the cage itself.

So what would this cage do? Well, you could make it so that it periodically tortures mobs to give you a constant boost to your altar's LP pool during blood rites. Or, you can allow a player to use a rune as the floor of the cage to produce an effect. Then, there would be a higher echelon of runes that the player must spend precious resources (and plenty of blood, of course!) to create. An example of an effect might be to have a rune that draws a specific type of mob (hostile/docile/villiager) to the altar, and the effect could stack, so the more of that particular rune you have, the higher its range of attraction would be. One rune might increase the LP yield each time the cage blood-lets the creature inside, or increase the frequency of blood-letting. Or maybe, since I know adding extra runes to the game would be a trifle for you with coding, adding extra crafting recipes, and all that, you could use the elemental inks on existing runes. So let's say you put down a speed rune, and hit it with a certain kind of elemental ink, the block becomes a new kind of rune that is specific for use as the floor of the Sanguine Cage.

This concept could also open up options for varied blood rites, giving you lots of interesting ways to use your altar. Maybe requiring certain types of mobs to achieve a certain kind of blood rite to obtain a powerful artifact. So, let's say you have a zombie in each Sanguine Cage around your altar, and fill your altar with blood, and then place some kind of binding stone in the altar, or a blood orb, or maybe even a zombie head. You'd get a zombie artifact that is sort of a manifestation of undead properties. And that artifact could be used in crafting, or even carried in the inventory to produce passive status effects with pros and cons. I like the idea of having passive character effects, because then you have benefits that don't require space on your hotbar, which is something I think every minecraft player can relate to. Keep in mind, it would still be balanced by the fact that it takes up inventory space.

Hell, you could even make it so that the corners of the altar have to be capped with another set of altars, for blood storage and imbuing rites kind of like the one above, but with items and artifacts, instead of caged mobs.

These things would produce so many different play options, that you actually have a lot of choosing to do between the combinations, thereby really defining just what kind of blood magus you are, and your own unique way of attempting to slake the nigh unquenchable thirst of the blood gods.

P.S. How about initiating villagers into a Crimson Brotherhood of sorts who assist in altar ceremonies, or even act as willing sacrifices (for a lower LP yield [say, 600 LP] than a regular villager, because, you know...the blood of the innocent is much sweeter to demon lords and their ilk. DUH!)?