What it is

Every ruin in Minecraft used to be something before it was a ruin. This mod gives you a compass that chimes toward the nearest shipwreck and a lens that puts the ship back: a full-size, walk-through, see-through ship standing over the broken one. It plays a short scene, fades, and leaves a fainter echo pointing at a single block in the sand. Break that block and you get Captain Ilyra Vale's logbook, permanently stamped with her name and yours. Right now the shipwreck is the only memory that exists; the rest of the mod is still to come.

The compass does not point, it chimes, and the chime comes from the direction you should be walking. It gets faster and higher as you close in, which means the last hundred blocks feel like a game of hot and cold played through headphones. Then you are standing in a broken hull on the seabed, you raise the lens, and the ship builds itself upward out of the wreck in pale cyan (deck, mast, yardarm), full size, standing exactly where it went down, and you can walk straight through the parts of it that are not really there. A bell rings once from the mast. Twenty-six seconds later it comes apart from the top down and the sea is empty again, except for a smaller, faster chime coming from one specific spot under the mast.

👥 Playing with friends

Nearby players watch the same ghost ship, and exactly one logbook exists no matter who digs.

⚠️ Before you install

This is a vertical slice, not a finished mod. Expect one ship and untextured spectral geometry.
Only one client playtest pass has happened. Whether the hull lines up convincingly with the different vanilla shipwreck shapes, and whether it stays legible under water, are still open questions.
Needs Minecraft 26.1.2 and Java 25 specifically.

Your first 5 minutes

New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.

Craft an Echo Compass: a compass, an amethyst shard and a copper ingot, shapeless.
Craft an Echo Lens: a spyglass, an echo shard and an amethyst shard, shapeless.
Hold the compass and walk. The chime comes from the wreck's direction and its cadence and pitch climb as you get closer.
Stand inside the wreck, or right-click a wreck block, and use the lens.
Watch all twenty-six seconds: the hull rises from the bottom up, the mast bell strikes, then it dissolves from the top down.
Keep the compass out. A faster residual chime leads you to one exact block near the projected mast. Break it once.

How it works

The compass, which does not have a needle

The Echo Compass searches for the nearest supported wreck and then pulses at you: sound only, sent to nobody but the holder, from a point offset toward the target so headphones give you a direction. Distance controls both cadence and pitch. Wrecks you have already explored still count. It also drops one short action bar line when a site becomes ready, when the search phase starts and when the memory is finished, and a completed site stops pulsing altogether.

Tip: The near-target clue uses a distinct double pulse, so you stop circling instead of orbiting the block forever.

Memories are deterministic

A memory site's identity comes from the dimension and the structure's stable anchor point, not from anything random, so the same wreck is the same site forever. The world seed decides which of three story variants a site carries. The relic's hiding place is worked out once from the mast position, snapped down to a safe block that is not a chest or anything unbreakable, and then saved permanently. It is never recalculated, even if you reshape the beach afterwards.

The projection places no blocks

The intact Northwind is spectral geometry, not building. It has no collision, changes nothing in the world, and leaves nothing behind. You can walk through it while it stands. If a client never draws it at all, the memory still runs to completion, because the server keeps the clock and moves the site from playing to searching after 520 ticks regardless.

Tip: That split is deliberate: the story is server truth, the ship is presentation.

The twenty-six second scene

Fixed beats. A deep resonance at the wreck, then sparse particles tracing the ship's footprint, then the hull revealing itself from the bottom up over five seconds, settling, and a single bell strike at the mast with a clue flare. The captain's route follows: she walks from the stern to the mast, kneels, hides the logbook beneath the deck, a second bell rings from below, she looks toward shore and then turns back toward you. Then the ship dissolves from the top down and the search begins.

Exactly one logbook

A site walks through six stages (dormant, discovered, ready, playing, searching, recovered) and only moves forward. The recovery service commits the site to recovered before it hands anything over, so two players breaking the relic block on the same tick still produce exactly one logbook. Replaying the vision with the lens never rewinds progress, and the recovered state survives saving and reloading.

Tip: An interrupted scene falls back to ready on load rather than getting stuck.

Provenance

The Northwind Logbook is not a generic item. It permanently carries which story it came from, whose it was, the site id and dimension, and the name and UUID of the player who dug it up, along with the game time. Its tooltip reads '✦ Once belonged to Captain Ilyra Vale' and, underneath, that it was recovered by you from the wreck of the Northwind.

Tip: It is never craftable. There is one per wreck and it says who found it.

Operator commands

Development builds expose a game-master command set: /ouac demo reconstructs a ship eight blocks in front of you for renderer testing, /ouac locate reports the nearest cached site and its distance, /ouac status prints the site's stage and exact relic coordinate, /ouac activate and /ouac reset drive the state machine directly. They are testing tools, not progression.

Items & blocks

Echo Compass

Finds memory-bearing ruins by ear rather than by needle. Its chime comes from the target's direction and speeds up as you approach, then switches to a faster residual pulse once a memory has played and something is left to dig up.

Where: Shapeless: compass + amethyst shard + copper ingot. The recipe is deliberately cheap while the mod is being tested.

Echo Lens

Plays the memory. Use it while standing inside a wreck, or use it directly on a wreck block, and the intact ship reconstructs over the ruin. Using it again replays the vision without resetting any progress.

Where: Shapeless: spyglass + echo shard + amethyst shard.

Northwind Logbook

Captain Ilyra Vale's record of the expedition, sealed under her own mast. It remembers who she was and who found it, forever.

Where: Break the one exact block the residual echo leads you to after the memory has played. There is only ever one, and it can never be crafted.

The Northwind

The ship itself: roughly 9 blocks wide, 24 long and 13 tall including the mast, drawn as translucent cyan voxels with a raised bow and stern and a yardarm near the top of the mast. Its deck is pinned to the waterline, so it sits in the sea rather than hovering over it.

Where: Use the Echo Lens at any supported shipwreck. It stands for 26 seconds and then goes.

Lore

Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.

Captain Ilyra Vale

The Northwind was an archive vessel. It carried a small expedition and all of their records toward a settlement, and it was deliberately run aground during an evacuation. Before she left, Ilyra sealed her logbook beneath the mast so that the expedition's account would survive even if the crew never came back. The first release does not explain what the disaster was.

The last line of the logbook

'The gate is lit. If the shore party returns before dawn, we sail. If not, the Northwind waits for them.' That sentence is pointing at a ruined portal memory that has not been built yet, which is the mod's way of promising that separate ruins will eventually turn out to be one story.

What the scene is teaching

The Northwind exists to teach the grammar of every memory that comes after it, without ever saying any of it: a ruin can become whole; a bright ghost action marks the part that matters; you then have to search the present at the same spot; the thing you dig up belonged to a named person who is gone.

Jokes & trivia

Bits you might miss

The ghost ship is 660 blocks of geometry and 1,870 visible faces, which is a very precise way to describe a haunting.
Captain Ilyra's walk is keyframe animation rather than pathfinding, so she does not need anything solid under the spectral deck to walk on. She also is not drawn yet, which makes her an invisible woman confidently not falling through a ship that is not there.
Three deterministic story variants exist, are locked to your world seed, and at the moment all look exactly the same.
The hull used to hover four blocks above the sea like a very polite ghost. The deck is now pinned to the waterline.
The first playtest looked like the wreck-finding was broken. It was not. The saved records proved it had found the wreck and got all the way to the search phase. The player simply had no way of knowing, so the fix was a louder chime.
The relic block is chosen once and never recalculated, so if you terraform the beach afterwards, that is between you and the beach.

From the workshop

The renderer had to be written from scratch rather than carried over from an earlier mod, because Minecraft 26.1 replaced the old buffer pipeline with a system where the game extracts a snapshot of the scene and mods submit geometry into it.
Fifteen automated tests cover deterministic site identity and story variants, stages only ever moving forward, recovery from an interrupted scene, the save format round-tripping, hidden-face culling and the ship's orientation.
Everything in the mod uses one shared transform helper for rotation, covering the renderer, the captain's marks, the sound cues, the clue and the relic offset, so no two subsystems can disagree about which way the bow is pointing.
The project's own notes record the pattern behind it: worldgen projects stall and renderer projects ship.
The vertical slice deliberately stopped at one ship. The captain's model, real sounds, finished art, the Chronicle screen and every other kind of ruin are all later milestones.

FAQ

How much of this is actually built?

One memory: the Northwind shipwreck. The compass, the lens, the full-size spectral ship, the timed scene, the search and the one-per-world logbook all work. The captain is not drawn, the art is placeholder voxels, and no other ruin type does anything yet.

Which ruins can I use it on?

Shipwrecks, and only shipwrecks. Every other structure is a later milestone.

Can two of us both get a logbook?

No. The site commits to recovered before it hands anything out, so even a simultaneous break produces exactly one logbook, attributed to one player.

Can I watch the scene again?

Yes. Using the lens again replays the whole reconstruction. Only the first activation moves your actual progress, so replaying can never duplicate the relic.

Do I need it on the server as well as my game?

Yes. The server owns the memory and its timing; your client draws the ship. Other players standing nearby see the same reconstruction.

What version does it need?

Minecraft 26.1.2 with NeoForge 26.1.2.83 or a compatible build, on Java 25.

Crafting recipes

Crafting recipe for Echo Compass — Echo Compass

Crafting recipe for Echo Lens — Echo Lens

Get it

Status: Partly built. Some of it works, some of it is missing.

Install NeoForge for Minecraft 26.1.2. The install guide walks through this assuming no prior knowledge.
Drop the mod's .jar file into your mods folder.
Everyone on the server needs it.
Launch the game with that loader's profile selected.

📦 Where is the file?

This wiki documents the mods; it does not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under mc-once-upon-a-chunk/build/libs/.

Mod by Bora Suda. Story and scene spec for the Northwind live in NORTHWIND_STORY.md.

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