Made as a part of Legacies, aiming to completely reimagine modded Minecraft while upholding these same unique, vanilla-style design principles. If you like Legacies and Legends, I highly recommend you check it out!
My design process, as an example, wasn't to show you what's on the other side of the Ancient City portal, or what else is out there in the End, or even to explain the past - it's to make you wonder what could be, such as vanilla's open-ended lore, only expanded.
Legacies and Legends is, finally, a soundtrack expansion, the first of its kind in this sense. It also adds new items, structures and lore - and ultimately will enrich your playthroughs or even modpacks without changing the core experience.
The full description continues below the mod showcase.
Mod Showcase thanks to Sigma_
Atmospheric Soundtrack Overhaul
Legacies and Legends introduces several new tracks to the game, all thematic to their locations and carefully selected to ensure they blend perfectly with vanilla.
For a standalone, vanilla-friendly resource pack, check out Music and Melody
Several new songs (including some left-out ones from the official soundtracks) are added to the game's base soundtrack for various biomes, as well as a bonus track for when you light the end portal. These tracks are considerately weighted to ensure vanilla and C418 music still get their chances to shine. Special thanks to Firel for composing Only the Beginning as a new end track for this mod!
The soundtrack expansion additionally includes 5 new music discs - Svall (Mineshafts), Taswell (Deep Ruins), Shulker (End Cities) Tundra (Igloo Basements) and Far Lands (crafted from disc fragments scattered across select structures of the overworld).
Click here to view the complete Legacies OST as a youtube playlist!
Bonus: Nature's Melody - adds extra music for Nature's Spirit's biomes, much like Legacies and Legends does for vanilla
Loot Table Reworks
Most structures have seen their loot tables reworked or rebalanced in a vanilla-like fashion - for example, End Cities are mostly untouched, but a Jungle Temple has a few additional items in addition to the chests containing more overall items on average than vanilla. In other cases, you may find entirely new items to the loot tables, such as the enchanted stone tools that can be found rarely in underwater ruins. Regardless the structure, there's a good chance it's seen some changes, anywhere from a slight tweak to a complete overhaul.
In addition to this, a few new, rare items are added to further expand on the atmospheric and lore side of structure loot. 3 new, extremely (trust me, super hard to find) rare armor sets (don't worry, they're perfectly balanced against vanilla and won't stuff with balance or progression) provide additional worldbuilding - namely the Ward (Deep Ruins, Sculk Ruins, Ancient Cities), Fortress (Nether Fortress) and Dungeon (Dungeons) armor sets. Again, while they can spawn in these structures, they are very rare and make great bonus loot without messing up the core game's functions, thanks to their careful balancing and inherent rarity. They can be repaired using echo shards, blaze rods and iron ingots respectively.
I haven't just added armor sets to the game, however. I've taken some inspiration from Minecraft's early days - filled with random new features and items that often had no reason to exist, but did anyway. There are a few other small items that provide an enriched loot experience. Firstly is Bottomless Beetroot - as the name suggests, it's beetroot that doesn't go away when eaten! It's quite rare, and generally found in places where golden apples are found - including Mineshafts and Jungle Temples, and can even be crafted into Bottomless Beetroot Soup, a powerful food source, albeit extremely difficult to acquire, as you need 6 to craft it.
Secondly, we've got some new ocean-themed loot... because fishing is boring, and, after all this new content, I thought the ocean needed some love - I want to ensure everything is treated equally. We've got useless Wooden Buckets, because why not? At least they can be furnace fuel (and, if you surround them with coal in the crafting table, are really great at being fuel too)... but don't worry, fishing can now provide Metal Chunks, hard metal scrap that can be smelted into iron nuggets, as an insignificant bonus source of materials while fishing. Most importantly, however, is the new Hook item (repaired with the aforementioned Metal Chunks), a fishing-inspired weapon, that while not able to compete with lategame weapons, makes for a fun and fast-hitting midgame slasher.
Thirdly, we've got the Ancient Knife (repaired using copper ingots). Complete with Farmer's Delight compatibility, this new weapon, much like the Hook, can't quite compete with a netherite sword - but is fun and effective nonetheless. It can be found rarely in suspicious gravel at the Trail Ruins or new Ruin structure.
Finally, we've got Super Suspicious Sand. It's super suspiciously normal-looking. And floats. It can also be smelted into the most pointless glass you've ever seen... refuse to float. You can find it as a rare drop from Husks.
New Structures
Legacies and Legends includes quite a few new structures, all small and carefully balanced to keep them nice, rare and unobtrusive - perfect for vanilla integration... and expanding on the lore.
These include Ruins (anywhere Trail Ruins are found), Deep Ruins (found underground at y-52, once outposts of the Ancient Cities), Sculk Ruins (y-52 deep dark), Underground Remnants (y5 to y55 underground), Ruined Libraries (overground in plains and forests), Cherry Ruins (it's 1.20, so I added a nice, rare structure to the Cherry Grove), a new ruined nether structure (super rare, I'll let you see them for yourself), and 2 new ruined structures for the End dimension.
As you can probably tell, these structures, while seemingly plentiful, are all quite rare, vanilla-style and closely linked to the lore, and, trust me, will feel like only a couple new structures in your world - I do not believe in structure clutter unlike many other structure mods.
Lore Expansion
Finally, the piece that brings it all together. Lore. The lore expansion is closely linked with many new structures, items and even music, but there's an added component - many structures now have a very low chance to contain a lore book, a written book with a short excerpt of lore embedded. There are quite a few, and are designed to complement the very minimalistic and open-ended lore and story of the base game in similar ways.
They've all been carefully written, and are fully vanilla-compliant and not immersion breaking (they are quite open-ended and aren't throwing made-up lore at you) whatsoever, even if you dislike the idea of them. Trust me, find one and you'll get what I mean.
For obvious reasons, I can't say more about this, but I hope you have a blast uncovering all the new lore over your playthroughs.
Credits
Credit to Blockus for the cracked end stone bricks texture, which was used instead of making my own for consistency in modpack projects. Note that this texture is licensed under LGPL. You can check out Blockus here.
Special thanks to Firel for making an amazing end track, Only the Beginning, just for this mod - listen to it here!
Special thanks to Sigma_ for all the support (including taking the time to create an awesome mod showcase)!
Special thanks to King (from the Nature's Spirit Discord) for providing the texture for the [REDACTED]!
Here is a link to all composers for their music.
Firel - https://www.youtube.com/@FirelMusic/featured
Sigma_ - https://www.youtube.com/@sigma_mc
C418 - https://c418.bandcamp.com
BouncyTorch - https://bouncytorch.xyz
Terraainn - https://www.youtube.com/@Thaetaa-Terraainn
qwaston - https://www.youtube.com/@qwaston
Firch - https://www.youtube.com/@Firchex
bhuv_ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhV2mtaM8wQ
Technotech - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uVA7RKZ2XM
T_en_M - https://www.youtube.com/@TenM
Steelman - https://www.youtube.com/@steelmanmusic
Talon Trueblood - https://www.youtube.com/@TalonTrueblood
AFRH Music - https://www.youtube.com/@AFRHmusic
b. enjae - https://www.youtube.com/@inkyoggy/featured
Naps the Block Music - https://www.youtube.com/@napstheblockmusic5807
solunary - https://www.youtube.com/@solunary
Oh Eight - https://www.youtube.com/@oheight
Freja Nelson - https://www.youtube.com/@frejanelson/featured
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