Trickster

Trickster is a magician-themed magic mod based on an esoteric programming language, loosely inspired by Hex Casting. It allows you to draw infinitely nested spell circles and glyphs, combining various tricks to create spells of any complexity - from simple effects to incredibly complex constructions.

What Can You Create?

Absolutely everything!

The spells you inscribe on scrolls are built using a tree-like structure that is Turing-complete. This gives you complete freedom in achieving desired results. Your spells can literally do everything you can imagine!

Assuming your imagination is limited by the available set of symbols. The library is not responsible for overly active imagination or other forms of excessive creativity.

That's Quite a Bold Statement, Isn't It?

Yes, but we believe it's justified.

First, spells continue to operate until completely finished, which can essentially last forever! They run concurrently with the main game and can be saved to disk or loaded from it at any moment, just like everything else in Minecraft. This means you can leave a spell active, log out of the game, return after two days, and find it working from the same point.

Second, spells can be infinitely large and complex. Although there is a limit on spell execution speed (to avoid overloading the server), the magical construction itself can be as convoluted or simple as you want!

Last but not least, while mana is required for all world-altering effects, it's theoretically possible to infinitely increase the amount of mana available to you. Mana serves more as a balancing mechanism than a limiter of your potential.

Where to Begin?

We've made sure this process is as simple as possible.

All symbols, tricks, and spell creation methods are thoroughly documented in the Tome of Tomfoolery™ - the primary guide to creative mischief. Thanks to integration with the excellent Lavender mod and fully customizable interactive elements, the Tome™ offers an advanced reference experience for all your magical needs.

Check out the web version of the book at trickster.ing!

What Else to Expect?

As befits a good magic mod, we provide a solid set of tools and trinkets to facilitate spellcasting.

Functional Programming in Action

For those familiar with programming, the spell system in this mod can be described as tree-based functional programming, most closely resembling languages like Haskell or Clojure. This means several important features:

• Data is immutable
• Recursion is not just possible, but the primary way to achieve cyclic behavior
• Which, of course, includes infinite recursion
• Data can only move up the tree from one node to the next
• Although there are ways to split the tree, as well as pass and manipulate other trees as data, effectively overcoming this limitation

These principles combine with other functional paradigms to create a very clean yet powerful scripting language.

Credits

Some item textures are provided by @midnightcartridge on Discord.

We also thank @crephan for help with many item textures and models.

This mod was originally created for Modfest: Carnival, but has since developed far beyond its initial concept.