Modulus Design Scraps

so modulus is a tool mod that i am working on very slowly. i am currently in rewrites here (Codeberg) and all the design decisions are coming up again.

Datagen first

  • All textures are datagenned through sprite cutting.
    • Save for the tool handle, which is custom (but just a stick, really..)
  • All materials are datagenned from json files.
    • This is how mod integration should work. Mods will have to provide their own tool heads, though.
  • Modulus keeps tool rendering closest to how Minecraft renders stuff normally (hopefully)

Tactility

  • You must feel the creation of the tool
    • Modulus is very inspired by point-and-click games, where you combine things in your inventory.
  • You must want to like your tool
  • You should be able to customize your tool to where it feels sufficiently yours.
    • Custom tool handles, tool handle accessories (ribbons)
    • Perhaps: trims
  • You should feel bad if your tool is destroyed (to the same extent, maybe a bit more, than vanilla)

Enchanting, breaking

  • The ‘soul’ of a tool lies in its handle. The tool can break but the soul should not break.
  • The handle holds things like enchantments. This means in theory you could have one pickaxe-head and swap between a fortune-handle and a silk-handle. This is funny and inconvenient enough that I would permit it.

Two-headedness and its tradeoffs

  • Using one head of a pickaxe must be worse than using two heads of pickaxe.
  • Otherwise, there is no point in using a two-headed pickaxe ever
  • There are not enough tools to make two-headedness make much sense, to be honest.
    • This is why Tetra adds things like ‘adze’s, and other things that don’t make sense.
    • I’m not sure if this kills two-headedness as a concept, because I don’t particularly want to make a bunch of these. I don’t like the idea of adding five new tools that are roughly equivalent to vanilla tools. It is confusing.
  • I think a tool mod is somewhat useless if you don’t have some exciting new tools though.

Tool kinds, in general

  • I think that there are two ways of going about this: either stay vanilla-ish, or make something so weird and out-there that it becomes interesting.

Vanilla-ish

  • I think that it would be interesting to add a few new tool kinds, but I am not super interested in many of these:
    • Mining hammer (Your classic 3x3 pickaxe)
    • Dagger, knife, whatever a short sword is.
    • Scythe. I think scythes are cool. (I guess this is just a sort of long slow sword with grass-cutting powers. I guess this could be used for harvesting crops.)
  • It would be funny to add in support for the new-era tools, eg Maces, Spears.
    • Aside: I completely forgot that they added spears.
  • I do not care about bows enough to rework this entire mod to make bows more fun to use, currently.
  • Joke: add the Poisonous Potato Hammer back to the game

Out-there

  • Nonfunctional hard-light tool head that uses computer-magic to livestream tools of your choice from your house (therefore only taking up one slot in your inventory), but the further you go from your house the worse the latency gets and eventually it cuts off. You can fix this by installing repeaters around your world but this has a cost of making your landscape be filled with large antennae. Which may be something that you would want to do.
    • You could maybe sidestep this with more arcane computer-magic but at the cost of instability. Maybe it randomly loses more durability, maybe it swaps randomly between tools, maybe it costs health. Maybe if you bring the tool too close to the streamed-tool it explodes or something. I dunno.
  • <rephrasing alwinfy> handles are tool addons, eg a soul gem for enchanting, rotary device to swap heads, blaze rod handle
    • cover the handle in slime to make it slippery
    • quark-pickarang detaching handle
      • shotgun handle lol
        • Double Barreled Handle

Lore and such

  • what if i take the lore really seriously for fun. like go really over the top in a way that is kind of annoying

  • Modulus tools are extradimensional

  • Guide book ‘Lorem Implementimodularis’ (clearly a nonsense word lol) is heavily redacted in enchant-table language (intergalactic alphabet or something?) but not in the moving sense because that would get really annoying.

would read something like this

??????? Basic Operation

? ???? ?????? ?? ?? ? ??. ????????? (known to ?????? as the Ablate Tool Dereconstructor) ????? ?? ?? ????? ? ??? ?? used to sever a ???? from its parts.

im terrible at writing so this is probably annoying and such, but i am taking myself very seriously for fun.

names for things

  • tool modularizer -> ablate tool dereconstructor
  • tool inspector -> peering metainspector
    • in order to be lore accurate the inspector should show you at least like one thing about your tool that is confusing and strange. like ?????? 30/??. changes randomly based on time of day combined with player location or something
  • soul gem -> idk
Last updated: Jun 20, 2026 ()