Phantom Keep

The Long Court is still in session.

Six lords swore their founding oaths in a single hall on a single morning, and the keep swore too — stone to stand while any witnessed oath holds. Then the sky came down on the High Seat and left no ruin. The oaths were never released, because release must be spoken and nobody was left with standing to speak it. So the witness still stands, nowhere and therefore anywhere, and the court it carries is still in session.

Everything in the keep follows from that. The Archivist is still taking minutes of an empty hall. The Gate-Captain is still holding a gate. The Household Guard is still checking a list that ran out of names ninety years ago.

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What generates

A walled fortress — an outer wall, a mid wall, a deserted village in the ward between them, and an undercroft beneath it holding the ritual chambers. It assembles itself from 320 hand-placed structure pieces across 77 jigsaw pools, and generates in 39 overworld biomes, badlands to pale garden.

Keeps are rare on purpose: roughly 12,000 blocks apart, and never closer than 8,000. Finding one is an expedition rather than an errand.

/locate structure phantoms_keep:phantom_keep

Twelve bosses

Each has its own summoning condition, its own moveset staged at two thirds and one third of its health, and its own three-edition book. The third edition of every book carries the reader's own name.

Most are called at the altar — drop that boss's relic on an uncharged respawn anchor inside the keep and a four-second ritual raises it. Some are earned instead. The Mason answers five bells rung in the right order. The Pale Warden answers moss cut over the heartwood. Two answer something you do out in the village rather than something you carry.

Boss	Who it was
The Hollow Phantom	the keep's memory of a wearer
The Gate-Captain	Serla Voss, who never stood down
The Archivist	the Recorder, still writing
The Mason	Hale Brann, who would not say how many towers
The Under-Librarian	the signal floor and the silence
The Broodmother	what the cells were really for
The Pale Warden	the creaking of the pale wood
The Mirage Master	ground that was never there
The Void Weaver	a thread with no end
The Arch-Evoker	who recused himself, and fired anyway
The Household Guard	an iron golem given a list
The Razorback	a boar that got out and learned the lanes

The ward

Between the mid and outer walls is a village nobody lives in — about a hundred buildings per keep, laid on a grid of tiles that clear the trees and carry their own floor, drawn from the plains, savanna, taiga and winter village sets and repainted into the keep's stone and dark oak. Woodpiles, dry wells, dead crop rows, cold campfires, graves.

Its residents are still at home. Around sixty zombie villagers are baked into the houses, each carrying the profession of the building it died in — the librarian in the library, the smith at his forge — wearing ragged hats so the first morning does not empty the ward.

Two of them matter by name. Bacon is a piglet in a fenced pen in one corner of the courtyard; kill him and his father comes down the lane. Gus is the last name on the household list, standing in a stone yard in the opposite corner; kill him and the machine built to protect that list arrives to ask who you are.

The Regalia

Every boss always drops one signature piece, and the twelve form a single kit — four armour slots, eight tools and weapons, no duplicates. Clear the keep and you are wearing and carrying the whole of it.

The piece fits the boss rather than the slot that happened to be free. The Mason, who set every stone true, gives boots that never slip. The Librarian gives the sword called The Last Word. The Void Weaver, who spun a line with no end, gives the bow with Infinity.

Beat all twelve and the court adjourns: an elytra, the only item in the pack marked epic. After twelve of them the interesting prize is not more damage — it is being able to leave.

Sound — the companion resource pack

A separate optional download carries 17 custom sound events across 30 ogg files. The datapack works without it and falls back to vanilla events everywhere it can, but two things are quieter than intended:

• The Mason's summoning rite plays five distinct bell notes that accelerate into a peal. The bell puzzle is a listening puzzle — the notes are meant to be told apart by ear.
• Each boss has its own theme, which takes over the keep's ambient track the moment the fight begins.

Installing

1. Drop the datapack zip, still zipped, into your world's datapacks folder.
2. Optional: put the resource pack zip in resourcepacks and enable it in Options.
3. Use a new world, or head somewhere you have never loaded — structures only appear in freshly generated chunks, so an explored world will not grow keeps in ground you have already walked.

Compatibility

• Minecraft Java 26.1.2 – 26.2 (pack format 101 through 107).
• Data pack format only. No mods, no loader, single-player or server.
• Adds nothing to vanilla worldgen except its own structure, and the resource pack ships sound only — no textures or models — so it layers cleanly under anything else you run.

This is an Alpha

Everything is in: all twelve bosses, the four undercroft rites, the ward, the Regalia and the sound. Every build passes an eight-stage checker before release — function reachability, every scoreboard objective and tag actually declared, all 2,356 vanilla ids verified against the 26.2 registry, and each boss's full chain from summon through death to drop to book.

What a checker cannot do is play. If something does not fire, please say so on Discord with where you were standing and what you did. Your latest.log is worth more than a description of the symptom — it names a failed function in plain English.