Feed the Reckoner a billion blocks and get nothing you can use
By the endgame you own a quarry, four mob farms and nine hundred stacks of cobblestone you will never use. Sunk Cost gives you a machine to feed it all to. The Reckoner counts every block it eats, by the million, without ever filling up, and gives you back nothing useful: no power, no tools, no dimension, no shortcut. It gives you trophies, a stone monument that grows on its own, and the machine's slowly thawing opinion of you.
The first thousand blocks feel like tidying up. Then the machine speaks, and it is not grateful, and something in you decides to change its mind. You route the quarry into a Maw, then a second quarry, then you rebuild the whole thing two sizes larger because 160 blocks a second is suddenly an insult. At a million the Reckoner tells you, precisely, that nothing has changed and the world is exactly as it was, and by then the spire behind it is taller than your base and you have stopped pretending you are doing this for a reward.
One shared leaderboard; from rank 5 the whole server is told who is wasting their life fastest
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
The Reckoner is a hollow cube of Reckoning Casing, 3x3x3, 5x5x5 or 7x7x7, with a Reckoner Core at one face centre and any number of Maws at the others. Feed it four ways: a chest against a Maw is drained, a pipe or AE2 export bus into a Maw works, right-clicking the Core with a full shulker box eats all 27 stacks and hands the box back, and items thrown into the hollow interior go the same way.
Every block the Reckoner takes is counted and destroyed in the same call. The machine has no inventory and never fills up, which is why a billion is a target rather than a save-file problem. A ledger holding a billion-block tally measures 195 bytes on disk.
One block is one unit, never a weighted score, because the number is the reward and a weighted number would be a lie. Only placeable blocks count; ingots, food, tools and mob drops are Chaff, refused audibly and with an opinion. Three cumulative item tags gate progress: everything feeds the raw total, refined blocks like iron, bricks, glass and concrete feed the refined quota, and precious blocks like diamond, netherite and beacons feed all three at once.
The ladder runs from Pile at 1,000 blocks through Vault, Treasury and Tectonic to The Sunk Cost at 1,000,000,000, each rung gated by all three quotas. Every rank hands you a trophy, an advancement, a line of the Reckoner's commentary and one more stage of the monument. Rank is a ratchet: even the admin grant and reset commands can lower a count but never a rank already earned.
Building a bigger Reckoner is the only way to go faster. A 3-cube eats up to 160 blocks a second, a 5-cube 1,280, a 7-cube 10,240, and the ceiling is shared across every Maw and every intake route at once, so a pipe mod cannot outrun the machine's size. Manual deposits bypass the budget entirely; a human clicking is its own rate limit.
At every rank the Reckoner builds itself upward, unbidden: a 3x3 plinth at rank one, then a single column, six courses per rung, until a 60-block spire stands behind it. It only ever writes into air, water and grass. A block of yours in its path is left exactly where it is, and that course simply never appears.
The trophies are awarded, never craftable, worth nothing, fireproof, and their tooltip colour tells anyone who picks one up how far you got. From rank 3 a particle aura follows you, escalating through five particle types, and your chat lines carry a coloured rank title. Both are toggleable per player. Trophies are owed rather than handed over on the spot, so automation can earn a rung while you sleep and the trophy is waiting at your next login.
The machine's face. Right-click for the readout; right-click with a full shulker box to deposit all 27 stacks at once.
Where: 8 Reckoning Casing around a diamond block.
The structural block of the multiblock shell.
Where: 8 deepslate bricks around an iron block, yields 8.
An intake port. Chests against it are drained; pipes and buses pointed at it are accepted, up to the machine's shared ceiling.
Where: 4 Reckoning Casing in a plus around a hopper, yields 2.
What the monument is built from. It has no recipe, because you cannot craft the proof.
Where: The Reckoner places it itself, six courses per rank.
The first trophy, at 1,000 blocks. Glowing, fireproof, worth nothing. Handed over with: 'Here. It is a small thing. So was the pile.'
Where: Awarded at rank 1. Never craftable.
The last trophy, at one billion blocks. 'There is nothing left to give you but this, and you never wanted anything else.'
Where: Awarded at rank 10. Meant to be reached once, by one server, eventually.
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
The machine is not impressed by you, and it says so, at length, for a very long time. Its commentary thaws by fractions across ten ranks: at ten thousand blocks it notes you have 'moved a small hill and called it an achievement', at three million it has 'stopped thinking of you as a player', and at one hundred million it is, and it wants to be precise about this, impressed.
The rank 10 message reads in full: 'One billion. There is nothing after this. There was never going to be anything after this. You knew, and you did it anyway. So did I. Thank you.' It is the only time the Reckoner thanks anyone for anything.
Trophies, a monument, a chat title, a particle aura and the Reckoner's commentary. Nothing that makes you stronger, on purpose: the moment it granted a power it would become a grind you have to do, and the joke would die with it.
Only what you give it, but what you give it is destroyed instantly and irreversibly. Shulker boxes themselves are never eaten, and a box with anything inside bounces off.
Yes, that is the intended endgame. Pipes and AE2 buses into a Maw work through the standard item-handler capability, capped by the machine's size. Rungs earned while you are offline pay out their trophies at your next login.
No. The tally lives in a permanent per-player ledger on the server, survives restarts, and rank never goes down, not even by admin command.
Rank-ups from rank 5 upward are announced server-wide by default. The broadcastFromRank config option set to 11 silences the announcements; the personal lines stay, because they are the mod's voice.
NeoForge 21.1.0 or newer on Minecraft 1.21.1, on both server and client. No Forge or Fabric build exists.
Status: The jar compiles and the author has tested it himself, but it has not had a real playtest yet.
.jar file into your mods folder.This wiki documents the mods; it does
not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under
mc-sunk-cost/build/libs/.
Bulletpies