About and Credits - Electroblob77/Wizardry GitHub Wiki
Electroblob's Wizardry has come a long way since its beginnings as a personal foray into Minecraft modding and its initial release in April 2017. Here's a little about how the mod came to be, and the people who made it happen.
A few years ago I got into playing with Minecraft mods, and having played around with some of the most popular magic mods, including Ars Magica 2, Equivalent Exchange and Thaumcraft, I felt that somehow they lacked something. Don't get me wrong, they're excellent mods and my coding skills aren't a patch on the likes of Azanor's, but ultimately I decided I wanted something a little different. In particular, I wanted a way to recreate the slick, combat-oriented magic from classic RPG games in Minecraft.
After a little thought, I decided that what I wanted was a mod where I could cast combat-oriented spells, which most importantly I could progress through by exploring rather than sitting at home, and which gave me that sense of excitement of not quite knowing what I would find. And I quickly realised I would want a lot of spells to make that work.
No mod that existed at the time fitted the bill - and so Electroblob's Wizardry was born.
I took inspiration for spells from various places, including:
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. A lot of spells resemble the ones in Skyrim, for the simple reason that they're just so good! There's a reason Skyrim is so popular. However, I didn't want to make a 'Skyrim mod', as that would have tied me into only the content from Skyrim and limited the mod's originality.
- Dungeons and Dragons. Magic missile is an example of a spell straight out of D&D, but more often than not I borrow certain aspects of spells and reimagine them to fit better in the blocky world of Minecraft.
- Dark souls. Shadow ward, lightning arrow, that sort of thing.
- Vanilla Minecraft itself! Some spells simply came from thinking of things that would fit nicely into the existing game, like vanishing box, pocket furnace and growth aura.
- Suggestions from the community! Ideas are always welcome, and I do genuinely read them. Sometimes I'll take parts of ideas I like and add my own twist, sometimes I'll write some of my own lore around them, and a few are so good they deserve to be added as they are!
My main aims for the mod are as follows:
- Mana should be gained by doing what you'd do normally in vanilla Minecraft: mining, exploring and farming.
- Progression requires exploration.
- Keep crafting recipes to a minimum, and don't overwhelm players with items and blocks either.
- Make the spells useful, playable and balanced. Not so useless that players instantly switch to a sword, but not so overpowered that they never use a sword again.
- Intuitive mechanics and a short set-up phase - a player should have access to novice spells at about the same stage as they get iron equipment.
The real moment of inspiration came when I realised the spell system I had created would be perfect for expanding upon, allowing any number of new spells to be added later on should users grow tired of the ones in the base mod. Several fans have taken it upon themselves to write spell packs and other addons using this system, and I've even written one myself - you can find links to all of these on wizardry's CurseForge page.
I get asked this surprisingly often, and the simple answer is: give it a go! Search for an up-to-date tutorial on getting started with modding Minecraft, follow it carefully, and go from there. If you get stuck, there's a whole community out there who will be happy to help.
A lot of modders will say you have to learn Java first. I disagree! Whilst it's certainly easier to start modding if you already know the basics of Java, it's difficult (and rather boring) to learn Java properly without a real program for context. For this reason, I think it's better to jump in and start following tutorials, but making sure you understand what the code is doing as you go, looking things up if you need to. Once you have a basic mod to work with, you can read more about the Java language and put it into practice as you learn. This is how I did it, and it's served me well so far!
Electroblob's Wizardry
A modification for Minecraft by Mojang AB
Designed, coded and textured by Electroblob
Thanks to Minecraft Forge and MCP, without which this mod would not have been possible.
Thanks also to the Minecraft modding community, which always has an answer to my modding problems!
In addition, I'd like to thank the following individuals for their contributions to the mod:
- Corail31
- 12foo
- Shadows-of-Fire
- HellFirePvP
- Tora-B
- Avatair
- Aeronica
- UltraHex
- Azim-Palmer
- raoulvdberge
- Spanish and Mexican Spanish: MadWrist
- Russian: VilagVil, kellixon
- French: Hahdrim
- Brazilian Portuguese: lorrampi
- Chinese: ZHENGLOC, dragon-evol
- Korean: shejery, rewi_wire
- Polish: Trozuu
Lightning ray sound effect from OhhWowProductions