Runic Skills

Turn your XP bar into a character build. Runic Skills adds a full RPG progression layer to Minecraft: spend the experience you already earn on ten skills, then cash those skills in for abilities, permanent stat upgrades and titles that other players can see.

Minecraft 1.20.1 · Forge 47.3.0+ Free and open source (Apache-2.0). Forked from JustLevelingFork and heavily reworked.

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How it works

You collect XP the normal way — mining, fighting, smelting, whatever you were doing anyway. Then you press Y, open the Skills screen, and spend that XP on whichever skill you choose.

That's the whole loop, and the choice is the point: XP spent on Strength is XP not spent on Magic. Each skill costs more as it rises, so nobody maxes everything, and two players who did exactly the same things end up with completely different characters.

There's no second XP bar to grind and nothing to babysit. Your experience finally has a long-term use beyond enchanting.

Ten skills to invest in

Each skill unlocks its own branch of abilities and stat upgrades:

Skill	Governs	Perks
Magic	Spellcasting, mana, and all nine magic schools	89
Endurance	Defence, wards, damage soaking	49
Tinkering	Smithing, repair, lockpicking, tool mastery	44
Fortune	Luck, critical hits, fishing, gems and sockets	44
Dexterity	Stealth, accuracy, dodging, ranged precision	43
Strength	Melee power, boss hunting, life-stealing	42
Intelligence	Enchanting, alchemy, trading, spell efficiency	41
Building	Mining, ore yield, salvaging, block work	41
Constitution	Max health, cooking, food and healing	39
Wisdom	Lore, focus, farming, arcane insight	39

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What you spend it on

Perks — 471 abilities you pick. Perks unlock at skill breakpoints and you toggle them on and off freely from the Skills screen. Vein Miner cascades an ore vein in one break. Wormhole Storage opens your ender chest from anywhere. Haggler talks villagers down. Cleave splashes damage into the crowd around your target. You have a limited number of active slots, so a build is about what you leave off as much as what you take.

Passives — 39 permanent stat upgrades. Pour levels into +Max Health, +Attack Damage, +Movement Speed, +Armour Toughness, +Projectile Damage and more. These use Minecraft's real attribute system, so they stack correctly with your gear and with other mods.

Powers — 75 deep magic specialisations. (needs Iron's Spells 'n Spellbooks) A second, separate loadout for spellcasters: 5 Marks, 3 Seals and 1 Crown, escalating in strength, covering all nine magic schools plus cross-cutting effects. Equip them from the Powers panel.

Titles — 77 badges for real milestones. Kill the Ender Dragon, beat the Warden, max out a skill. Earn one and you can wear it above your name, where everyone on the server sees it.

Item locking — gear gated by skill. (on by default) Powerful weapons, tools and armour require a matching skill level. Hand a new player a netherite sword too early and they simply can't swing it — which makes progression mean something instead of being handed over by one lucky chest. Locked items say so in their tooltip, so nobody is left guessing. Not for your world? A single toggle (enableItemLocks) switches the whole system off.

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Screenshots

Placeholder — add before publishing: Skills overview · perk detail page · Powers panel · title selection · a locked-item warning

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Getting started

1. Install Minecraft Forge 47.3.0+ for 1.20.1.
2. Drop the Runic Skills jar into your mods folder.
3. Launch and press Y.

That's the whole setup. No other mods are required.

Controls

• Y — open and close the Skills screen (rebindable).
• Powers panel — unbound by default so it can't clash with your pack; assign a key under Options → Controls.
• Skills tab — sits next to your inventory tab. If you use L2Tabs or Legendary Tabs (2.0 or newer), it slots into their strip instead of drawing over it.
• Hover a perk and hold Shift for its full description and level requirement.

Want the in-game settings menu? Add YACL — it's optional, client-side only, and just gives you a graphical config screen. Without it everything still works; you'd edit the config file by hand instead.

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Multiplayer

Works in single-player, LAN and on dedicated servers, using the same jar everywhere.

• Install it on the server and on every client — clients and servers must be on the same version.
• The server decides the rules. Skill caps, disabled perks and item locks are enforced server-side and pushed to clients on join, so one player's config can't give them an advantage.
• Your progress is stored per-world in your player data and survives death and dimension changes.

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Works with your modpack

Runic Skills integrates with around 40 mods. Every one is optional — it detects what you actually have installed and quietly skips the rest. Nothing crashes because a mod is missing.

Magic — Ars Nouveau (spell damage, mana regen, glyph mastery) · Iron's Spells 'n Spellbooks (all nine schools, spell gating, and the entire Powers system)

Gear & stats — Apotheosis and Apothic Attributes (affix, gem and socket awareness, plus a much wider stat pool for passives)

Quests & scripting — FTB Quests (six task types, so quests can require skill levels, perks or titles) · KubeJS (script your own skills, perks, passives and titles)

UI — L2Tabs · Legendary Tabs (2.0+)

Combat & content — Better Combat, Ice and Fire, Cataclysm, Mowzie's Mobs, Bosses of Mass Destruction, Stalwart Dungeons, Siege Machines, Saints Dragons, Samurai Dynasty, Nichirin Dynasty, Farmer's Delight and the Let's Do series, Nature's Aura, Jewelcraft, and more — mostly automatic level-gating for their gear.

Guns — TacZ, Scorched Guns 2, PointBlank (Vic's), Crayfish Gun Mod

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Configuring it

Every number is adjustable: skill caps, XP costs, how many perks you can run at once, which perks exist at all, and every item lock. Edit them in-game via the config screen, or directly in config/RunicSkills/.

Pack authors also get datapack support for titles, perk groups and custom skill artwork, plus KubeJS hooks for adding your own content. Full details are in the README.

To turn a perk off entirely, add its name to disabledPerks. To switch off item locking, set enableItemLocks to false — note that deleting the lock file regenerates the defaults rather than removing them. Apply changes live with /skillsreload.

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Commands

Operator commands (permission level 2):

Command	Does
/skills <player> <skill> get|set|add|subtract <level>	Read or change a skill level
/listskills <player>	Print all ten skill levels
/respec <player>	Reset that player's skills, passives, perks and Powers
/titles <player> <title> set true|false	Grant or revoke a title
/registeritem <item>	Add an item to the lock list at runtime
/globallimit <cap>	Cap a player's total levels across all skills
/skillsreload	Re-read the config and datapacks without a restart
/powers list|view|equip|unequip	Inspect and manage Powers

Available to everyone:

Command	Does
/respec	Reset your own progression

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What's new in 1.8.0

The client crash on Legendary Tabs 2.0 is fixed.

• Opening your inventory no longer crashes the game when Legendary Tabs 2.0 is installed. Legendary Tabs reshaped the API its tabs are built on; the Runic Skills tab was still written for the 1.x version of it, so the client died the moment the tab strip drew — which is every time you opened your inventory. The tab is now built on the 2.0 API.
• Legendary Tabs 2.0 or newer is now required if you use it. It stays entirely optional, but Runic Skills now declares the version, so an older Legendary Tabs is refused during mod loading with a clear message instead of letting you into a world that crashes.
• The Skills tab icon looks slightly different. Legendary Tabs 2.0 draws the button chrome itself and asks each tab only for an icon, so the tab now uses Legendary Tabs' own skills icon and picks up its per-screen button skins automatically.

Nothing else changed — no config, world data or network changes. Protocol is unchanged from 1.7.0, so a 1.8.0 client still connects to a 1.7.0 server, though running the same version everywhere is still the recommendation.

Coming from 1.6.x or earlier? 1.7.0 was a large correctness and security pass: four item and XP duplication exploits closed, configs no longer wiped by a single bad value, the global level cap enforced server-side, and the Powers panel made reachable. It bumped the network version, so ⚠️ clients and servers must both be on 1.7.0 or newer. Existing worlds and configs carry over automatically.

Full details for this and every previous release are in the changelog.

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Bugs and suggestions

GitHub issues is the fastest way to reach us.

For a crash, please attach logs/latest.log and your mod list. For anything config-related, add config/RunicSkills/runicskills.common.json5 too.

Translated into 17 languages. Pull requests welcome — including translation fixes.

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Credits

Otectus — current maintainer. JustLevelingFork — the original fork base.

Every mod we integrate with belongs to its own author; Runic Skills bundles none of their code and only adds thin optional compatibility layers.