Mystcraft

## **Synopsis**

Mystcraft adds the ability to craft alternate dimensions using books. These dimensions can be custom tailored or randomly created, adding a lot of excitement to the exploration process. Beware that some dimensions are extremely dangerous.

## **A Warning**

It is possible for you to get permanently stuck in an alternate dimension. In fact, I would dare say it is EASY for you to get stuck in an alternate dimension. Before you jump right in, perhaps read a little bit ahead. Know what you are getting into.

## **Getting Started**

Mystcraft is driven by books. As such, you are going to need a lot of leather and a lot of paper. You will also need a lot of ink sacs for making **Ink Vials.**

Once you have these three resources, go ahead and craft yourself an **Ink Mixer.** Put some Ink Vials and some Paper into the Ink Mixer to make some **Link Panel Pages**.

You can finally craft a special book; put a Link Panel Page into a crafting table with a piece of Leather to craft an **Unlinked Book.** Now, when you right click on the Unlinked Book it will turn it into a **Linked Book** which is linked to the exact place that you are standing and to the direction you are facing.

Now that you have a way home, let’s make a portal to somewhere else. Craft a **Book Binder** and place it down. Inside of it, place some leather and drop at least one Link Panel Page into the Book Binder. Then, type a name in the top left box. This will create a **Descriptive Book**.

## **Into The Unknown**

If you right click on a Descriptive Book, it will open it. You will be able to see its name and its author on the left most page. On the right page you will see a black hole looking thing. That is a portal. If you right click on the portal, you will be transported to the dimension which is linked to the Descriptive Book.

Some things to note. When you travel to another dimension, the book you used is dropped on the ground where you used it. It has a health bar and is able to take damage, including from rain. It is possible for the book that you used to be destroyed while you are not there. If you do not want this to happen, you can use a **Lectern** or a **Bookstand.** They both serve the same purpose; right click on them with a book and it will hold the book for you. You can travel through a book’s portal while the book is on a Lectern or Bookstand and the book will be safe. It also makes it easy to organize the dimensions you have been to.

**Important:**

Now, let’s prepare to travel to your first new dimension. In order to get back home you will need  a book which is linked to the overworld. This would be one of those Linked Books you made earlier. **If you die in an alternate dimension, you will respawn in the alternate dimension. If you lose your Linked Book to the overworld, it will be very difficult for you to get back to the overworld without using cheats.**

It is my recommendation that you go into every new dimension extremely overprepared. Bring more than one book linked to the overworld. Bring a chest and put backup overworld books in it so that if you die, you will not lose all of your books at one time. Bring a Lectern or Bookstand if you plan on visiting the dimension more than once so that you can put your overworld book down and it will be safe for you to use whenever you want. Bring backup tools and armor. Bring **torches**. You really need to be prepared for anything. There are worlds with no light at all. There are worlds with oceans made of sulfuric acid. There are worlds where you have permanent Wither III (I recommend a swift departure).

To get back home, just open up one of your Linked Books and right click on the portal. If it is linked to the overworld, the portal will be a lighter bluish color instead of the black. You will be transported back to where the book was linked to in the overworld.

## **You Are Stuck In An Alternate Dimension**

If you are very lucky, you will have spawned in a Dimension with a **Star Fissure.** This is a rift in space which will look like a hole which goes from the top of the dimension through bedrock, with a starry expanse at the bottom. If you jump into this hole, you will be taken back to the overworld. Each dimension only has a 10% chance of spawning a Star Fissure.

No luck? Next, is the Cake technique. First, you are going to need to craft a cake. That means getting your hands on three buckets of milk, two pieces of sugar, an egg, and three wheat. It might be quite a grind to explore the dimension you’re in looking for sugar cane and chickens and cows. Some dimensions will not even have the resources you need. Because of the More Buckets mod, if you find obsidian, clay, or virtually any type of ore, you will be able to make a bucket.

If by some miracle you have managed to make a cake, it is time to craft a way out. If there are trees, you can get saplings and craft an Overworld Cake. If there is Obsidian, and you have a way to mine it, you can craft a Nether Cake. If there are flowers, you might be able to make the Twilight Forest cake. If you have arrows, the Hunting Dimension Cake also isn’t too bad. I wouldn’t go after the End Cake or the Lost Cities cake, they are kind of difficult to make. If you can craft any of these cakes, you will be taken to the corresponding dimension where you should have access to an Overworld Cake and be able to get back home safely. Even if you don’t know where your Overworld Cake is, if you die in a non-Mystcraft dimension, you will be able to get back to the overworld.

If you are not able to craft a cake, you have one (legitimate) option left. You have to craft a new Descriptive Book using leather, a Link Panel Page, and a Book Binder. Hopefully this Descriptive Book takes you to a better dimension with more useful resources and less threats. It might take you to a worse dimension though, so consider collecting as many resources as you can from your current one.

If everything else fails, you need cheats. Run the command \tpx 0. It will teleport you to the overworld.

## **Custom Dimensions**

You may have noticed that you have the ability to turn the page in your randomly generated, one page Descriptive Books. You can add additional pages to your books in the Book Binder to customize the dimension which that book will link to. You can’t add more than one Link Panel Page. You can only add **Symbols.**

Symbols can be found in **Libraries**, randomly generated structures in every Mystcraft dimension. Inside these Libraries will be random pages with symbols on them. Pick them up and take them home with you.

There are a few different types of symbols. There are Biome Distributions, Celestials, Effects, Lighting, Modifiers (Basic), Modifiers (Biomes), Modifiers (Block), Modifiers (Colors), World Features, World Landscapes, Visuals, and Weather. If you add a “Island World” page to your book, it will fix the world generation to that of an Island World. If you add a “Eternal Rain” page to your book, it will fix the weather to be Eternal Rain. If you add a “Molten Unsweetened Chocolate Block” page to your book, it will add Molten Unsweetened Chocolate Blocks to the resource generation of the world.

In a Book Binder, place some Leather, a Link Panel Page, and as many additional pages as you want (symbols). Then give your book a name just like before and take your brand new book. You will be able to flip through all of the pages you added to your book so you can see what alterations you made to the dimension that it is linked to at any time.

## **Instabilities**

You may have noticed that the better a dimension’s resource generation, the more dangerous it is. Dimensions need to be balanced, so when the world generation is particularly lucrative, something else will compensate by being particularly detrimental. This takes many forms, including affecting all entities in the world with bad potion effects, raining fire from the sky, or at its worst, tearing apart the world with the spread of **Decay**.

You will know Decay when you see it. Or you might not because you will die so quickly you will hardly have time to realize what is happening. When a world is **Too** unstable, it will be overcome with Decay. The terrain will quickly be transformed into multicolored Decay Blocks which cover everything. If you see Decay, you best get out as fast as possible and never return. All of the dimensions which I have encountered decay in came with things along the lines of Meteor Showers, and Perpetual Wither, Poison, Weakness, Hunger, Slowness, and Blindness.

There are two main sources of instability. First, worlds which are built with conflicts will have instability. This means giving a Descriptive Book more than one world generation page so that the world generation clashes with itself. This means giving the Descriptive Book more than one weather page so that the weather clashes with itself. This could also mean **not** specifying one of the world’s attributes. When you do not specify one of the world’s attributes - the weather for example - it will be randomly generated. If you specify bad weather, it will help counteract other benefits, reducing instability and giving you more control.

The other source of Instability is Modifiers. The more valuable a Modifiers is, and the more frequently it is found, the more Instability will be added. This looks like adding Diamond Ore to the world generation. This looks like adding floating islands made of quartz. One of the largest sources of Instability is having oceans of some valuable molten material (it doesn’t even have to be particularly valuable, if it is modded, like from Nuclear Craft, it will be treated as valuable and generate massive Instability)

Your best bet in designing your Dimensions is to add bad things to your dimensions which are **bearable**. It is ok to live in perpetual darkness if it means that you don’t have perpetual Wither III. Honestly constant Meteors raining from the sky is preferable to most bad potion effects. By choosing the bad for yourself, you have more control over what you will have to endure, and that is better than rolling the dice in almost every case.

## **Other Useful Stuff**

The **Writing Desk** is very useful. You can use it to rename your books. You can also use it to make copies of your pages. Place a Descriptive Book or Page into any of the left-most slots. Put some paper and some Ink Vials into the Writing Desk as well. Now, if you right click on a page, a copy of the page will be made, consuming some ink and some paper. You can take the copied page out of the Writing Desk. You can also use the Writing Desk with Collation Folders and Symbol Portfolios (below)

**Collation Folders** can be used to store an infinite amount of pages. Right click on the Collation Folder to open it. It cannot be in a stack when you do this. Drop pages and symbols from your inventory into the Collation Folder to store them. The order of pages can be moved around and pages do not stack. This is mostly an organizational tool.

The **Symbol Portfolio** is similar to the Collation Folder but all pages placed inside of it are automatically sorted and stacked.

**Crystals** can be found randomly in some dimensions. Crystal can be used to build **Book Receptacles.** You can build a portal frame out of Crystal and place a Book Receptacle anywhere on the frame (not on the inside though, where the portal is going to be). Then, you can insert a book into the Book Receptacle with right click. This will generate a portal which can be used to go to the location which the book is linked to. Note that you have to generate the dimension first (the first time you use a book, you can’t use it with the portal)

The **Ink Mixer** can also be used to add modifiers to Link Panel Pages when they are created. Right click on the black circle (known as the Mixing Area) with certain resources in order to have a chance of producing a Link Panel Page with special effects. The effects are listed below. Keep in mind that some materials can add multiple effects. You will not be able to see if you have achieved a modifier until you take the page from the Ink Mixer. You might want to overkill on how much of a material you use so that you don’t waste a lot of tries trying to conserve resources.

**Disarm:** the player’s inventory is dropped at the origin of the teleport

Mushroom Stew (low success)

Ender Pearl (low success)

Bronze Dust (low success)

Gunpowder (medium success)

Fire Charge (medium success)

**Generate Platform:** the book will always generate a single block to stand on beneath the spawn location, giving the player a little bit of guaranteed protection

Diamond Dust (small success)

Clay (medium success)

**Intra-Linking:** allows the player to teleport within the same dimension

Ender Pearl (small success)

Bottle o’ Enchanting (small success)

Tin Dust (small success)

Iron Dust (small success)

Silver Dust (medium success)

Lead Dust (medium success)

Diamond Dust (medium success)

Gold Dust (high success)

**Maintain Momentum:** a player keeps their velocity when traveling to other dimensions

Feather (small success)

Diamond Dust (small success)

**Clears Modifiers:** negates the effects of adding materials to the Ink Mixer to try and give your Link Panel Page a modifier

Black Dye (high success)

Ink Sac (high success)