Sleight

Sleight

Right-click a mob and you swap places with it. That's the mod.

It sounds thin, and it would be, except the swap is honest. You get its position, it gets yours, and everything that came with it goes too: your momentum, and however far you'd already fallen.

So jump off a cliff, and on the way down swap with a cow standing at the bottom. You land fine. The cow takes the twenty blocks of fall you'd built up. Nothing in the code makes that happen, it's just what the rule does, and it's probably the first thing you'll work out.

That cuts both ways. The wand can't hurt anything more than your own position was already hurting you. If you want to kill something with it, you have to go stand somewhere lethal and let the thing come to you. Standing on a ledge over lava waiting for a creeper to close the distance is the actual gameplay. The cost is nerve, not durability.

What you can do with it

Right-click a living thing you can see, up to 32 blocks. You trade places. Four second cooldown, no durability.

Sneak-right-click instead and you mark it. Costs 3 levels and leaves a thin trail of particles running from your wand to that creature, which nobody else can see. From then on, right-clicking at empty air swaps you with it from anywhere in the same dimension, however far away. One mark at a time and it's spent once you use it.

That mark is a decent panic button, but it's also a living animal that wanders off while you're not looking. It might be in a ravine when you pull it. It might have been killed by something. If it dies you'll hear the thread snap wherever you are, which is a bad moment and one of my favourite things in here.

It won't target blocks

That's on purpose and it isn't going to change. The moment you can swap with a block it's just a short range teleport and there are plenty of those already.

Because it only works on living things, the wand is worth exactly as much as whatever happens to be nearby. In open desert it's a stick. In a busy cave it's the best item you own. You end up scanning rooms for things to grab onto, which is a slightly different way of looking at the game.

Crafting

 E        E = echo shard
EPE       P = ender pearl
 S        S = stick

Three echo shards means an ancient city, which is roughly where I wanted this to sit.

Settings

config/sleight.json, made on first launch. Range, both cooldowns, the level cost, whether other players can be targeted (off on servers, on in singleplayer), whether arrows count, and the excluded mob list. Warden, Wither and Ender Dragon are out by default.

There are five advancements as well.