Wishing Wells

Around 190k downloads on CurseForge since launch in July 2024. The idea is simple: the player runs into one of these wells while exploring the overworld and picks what to offer. The more valuable the item, the better the odds of walking away with a blessing, but the well can also send you home with a scare.

How a well works#

1. Wells generate in seven overworld biomes

   Warped Forest, Snowy Plains and several Taiga variants. They spawn naturally during worldgen, so players run into them while exploring.

2. Drop items into the well as an offering

   The item is consumed. Animation plays, particles drift up, the well rolls against the offering's probability table.

3. The well grants a blessing or hits the player with a curse

   Blessings include health regen, speed, strength, summoned animal companions and XP orbs. Curses cover wither, lightning strikes, falling anvils, slowness, blindness and zombie spawns.

Customization#

Almost every behaviour the well exposes is data-driven and editable from the config without recompiling the mod:

• Offering lists: which items count as valid offerings, and which ones are blacklisted.
• Probability tables: odds for each blessing and curse, tunable per offering tier.
• Per-dimension overrides: different effect sets, weights and offering rules per dimension.
• Worldgen knobs: biome whitelist for well generation and spawn density.
• Cross-mod integration: the config accepts IDs from any namespace, so offerings, blessings and curses are not limited to vanilla content. Reward the player with a Botania item, punish them by summoning an Ice and Fire mob, or accept Mekanism's priciest reactor as an offering. If it is installed in the modpack, it works.

The intent was that server admins could rebalance the whole reward table without touching code, so the same mod can power a hardcore SMP and a casual creative server with different configs.