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Ancient Ruins

Sixty ancient ruin sites, three archetypes, four strata and a codex. They pay nothing passively: what you get out of a ruin is what you dig out of it.

Sixty sites, and how a site knows its own ground

The server keeps a register of ancient ruin sites. There are 60 of them, each one an entry with a world, a centre, a type, an archetype and a set of strata. They are placed once, spaced apart by a minimum distance that is enforced against both the existing register and the other candidates in the same generation pass, and then they stay where they are.

Every site also records which chunks belong to it. That footprint is not decoration: it is the answer to "am I standing in a ruin?", and four separate layers ask it. The alert level, the trap layer, the Sentinel wake and the two site-scoped items the Curator sells all begin by looking up the chunk you are standing in. Earlier on, no site recorded a footprint at all, and every one of those layers was silently inert as a result. All 60 sites carry one now.

Two generators exist. Where the world's structure pack supplies the building, the plugin registers gameplay blocks into it. Where it does not, the plugin carves its own chamber below Y 0 in the deepslate band: a 9 by 9 room snapped to a chunk centre so it never straddles a chunk boundary, validated against a solid pocket before a single block is written, with corner pillars, a raised altar holding the vault chest, hanging soul lanterns and aged detailing. Either way the surface tell and the surface find spots are placed afterwards, by the site rather than by the builder, so both branches get them.

Because sites are deep and you are usually on the surface, discovery, the ambient warning and /ruin nearest all measure horizontal distance only. A ruin 60 blocks beneath your feet counts as underneath you, not as 60 blocks away. The astrolabe returns a bearing to the nearest site, and a Ruin Map binds to one target chosen in a fixed order: an undiscovered site first, then an unlooted one, then any.

Three archetypes, three locks

An archetype is a site's palette, room pool, hazard flavour, loot theme and one signature mechanic. It is a separate axis from depth: the loot table is keyed on archetype by stratum, which gives 12 pools, and the archetype is fixed at generation from the biome the site sits in.

For a long time the three archetypes differed only in paint. The signature mechanics were named but did nothing, so a Sunken Shrine was a Catacomb with different stone. They exist now, and each one is a real gate or a real hazard.

That spread is lopsided only in the sense that nobody chose it: 49 of 60 sites are the same place. Until that spread evens out, most of what you will meet is a Catacomb, and 4 of the 12 loot pools carry almost all of the traffic.

One ordering rule matters more than the mechanics themselves. The signature gate is checked before any key or sigil is consumed. Standing at a flooded shrine with an unpulled plug, or at an observatory at noon, costs you nothing; the vault refuses and your items stay in your inventory.

Strata 0 to 3, and the seal gates

A site is not one room. It has up to four strata, numbered 0 to 3, and each stratum has its own vault and its own gate. Descent is revealed when the stratum above it is emptied, so the only way down is through.

The Ruin Key is crafted, not looted: gold ingots in the four corners and the four edge slots filled with amethyst shards around a hollow centre, in the shape GAG / A_A / GAG.

Sigil Fragments cannot become a currency. Each one is stamped with the site id and the stratum number it was dug out of. Both are checked when you try to unseal, and the fragment is consumed on open. A fragment from another site, or from another floor of the same site, is worthless: it will not count towards the gate in front of you and it cannot be sold to somebody who needs one. There is no fragment market, by construction rather than by rule.

Each stratum walks a small state machine: undiscovered, discovered, breached, excavated, sealed. When the deepest stratum reaches sealed the site is spent. That is its finish, not a fault, and the message says so and points you at /ruin nearest. Nothing regenerates it.

Brushing, not mining

Sigil Fragments come out of the ground, and the ground has to be brushed. A find spot is a suspicious gravel or sand block that the plugin has pre-seeded with its contents, cleared of its vanilla loot table and tagged as belonging to a site and a stratum. The tag is what separates a find spot from the ruin's own structure, and that distinction decides whether interacting with it is rewarded or punished.

Across the 60 sites there are 509 tracked find spot positions, against a surface budget of 476. Positions are tracked rather than counted, which is what keeps the budget honest: a spot that could not be placed is refused and counted as refused, never written somewhere it would fall.

The surface ring is the part worth knowing about if you have never touched a ruin. It sits outside every gate in the system: no key, no tablet, no faction, no claim. It also cannot hand you a stratum key, and that limit is asserted in both directions by a self-check, because a fragment brushed out of a field would skip the Ruin Key and the tablet in one step.

Mining a find spot destroys it. The block is spent, the contents are lost, you get nothing, and the game tells you why. For a while the opposite was true and breaking one was strictly better than brushing it; that is fixed, and mining now also awards no perk roll. Breaking a find spot does not raise the site's alert, because it is a deposit rather than structure, but it is still a wasted find.

Brushing is also the Archaeologist's income. Brushing suspicious gravel or sand awards 6 XP and scaled coins once per block; breaking a decorated pot awards 4 XP. The Curator mastery doubles the dig XP and adds a 20 percent chance of a bonus Relic Coin. The job's Relic Sense ability, cast by sneaking and right-clicking a Brush, highlights buried and ruin loot within 8 blocks for 8 seconds, up to 40 targets, on a 60 second cooldown, and only lights up chests the plugin has actually tagged as treasure rather than every chest in your base.

What comes out of a vault

The loot table is weighted, reloadable and keyed on archetype by stratum. It holds 23 entries across 12 pools. Twelve pools is three archetypes times four strata; with the current 49 / 3 / 8 spread, all twelve are reachable, but most rolls land in the Catacomb columns.

A surface brush is deliberately modest: Relic Coins, an echo shard, amethyst, nuggets or bone. Vault contents are the archetype and depth pool, and the vault is a one-shot per stratum. Opening it also pays the opener a coin payout, which is a taxed personal payout rather than an untaxed grant, and it credits the site's claim owner with an extraction share (see below).

Relic Coins are the ruin currency and they are an item, not a balance. Right-clicking a stack sells it at the configured worth, currently 150 coins each, and the item's own lore quotes that figure so the price cannot drift away from the label. Sales are taxed on the ordinary path, and a sale of 10,000 or more is written to the audit log. Relic Coins are also minted elsewhere, by rift rewards and job drops, and all of them cash out at the ruins price.

There is one place Relic Coins go that is not a sale, and that is the Curator, who burns them. That makes the Curator the only real sink the coin has.

The alert, the traps and the Sentinel

Every site carries an alert level from 0 to 3. Breaking the site's own structure raises it. The level clamps at 3 and decays back down after 90 seconds of quiet, so a site you have been tearing at stays angry for a while. Alert level lives in memory and resets to 0 when the server restarts.

At alert 1 the traps arm. Traps are placed inert at generation and only become live on the 0 to 1 crossing, and the tell is a block rather than a particle: the block above the dispenser is the archetype's own detail block while the trap is inert and a redstone torch while it is live, which means a Bedrock client sees exactly what a Java client sees. Breaking the plate disarms it, and by default that does not raise the alert; the contract is break the plate before you step on it.

Stated plainly: traps are not placing yet. The placement coordinates still land inside the room's floor rather than at standing height, so the layer exists and arms correctly but has yet to put a single trap anywhere you could step on it.

At alert 3 the site wakes a Sentinel. That wake used to be completely ungated, and Sentinels died by the hundred in a single sitting, one in five of them suffocating inside a solid block. It is now gated, and the gate has numbers.

That last row is the one that stops the old failure. The spawn search starts at a seed position and widens in a ring; if it finds nothing it gives up rather than pushing the mob upward, because pushing upward is exactly how a wither skeleton ends up standing on open desert at noon.

A felled Sentinel drops Relic Coins through the ordinary drop path, so looting applies and every drop listener sees it. At the deepest stratum the mechanic changes shape: a guardian holds the vault, is woken at the vault when it refuses you, and your victory is persisted. Win that fight, log off, come back, and the vault is still open.

The codex and the curator

The ruin codex is per player. It tracks the same two axes the loot table uses, archetype by stratum, and it keeps its own record rather than deriving one, because the site's own discovery list is global and cannot tell one player's progress from another's. A chapter is one archetype at one depth; filling one means you have done that combination.

Completing a chapter pays a permanent, account-wide perk. It is deliberately utility or cosmetic, never coins, and the reason is simple: a paying perk would be income with no player action behind it, which is the exact shape of the hourly faucet the ruins system deleted. Two of the perks turn on brushing, and both of them only started firing recently, because they had been hung on the block-break event and brushing does not fire one. Three of the six perks are named but not yet wired up, and that is stated plainly rather than glossed over.

The Curator is the ruin vendor. He sells only for Relic Coins and he burns them rather than banking them. His shelf has five lines, and two of them only work while you are standing inside a ruin:

• Ward Charm, 8 Relic Coins. Quiets a site's alert. Refused if you are not in a ruin, and refused if the site is already quiet, because spending eight coins to lower an alert of 0 is a donation.
• Descent Charge. Re-seeds a floor's find spots, which is the remedy if you have brushed everything on a stratum and are still short of the gate. A one-room seed places 6.

Both refusals now happen before the coins are taken. That was not always true: for a long time the Curator burned the coins first and then discovered it could not deliver, and because no site knew its own chunks at the time, a Ward Charm bought while standing directly on top of a ruin burned eight coins and reported there was no ruin.

Nothing the Curator sells is a permanent power increase. The shelf is consumables and aids, on purpose.

What a ruin pays, and what it does not

This is the part most often remembered wrong, so it is worth being blunt about.

There used to be. An hourly keeper timer paid a faction treasury for holding a ruin, and it was deleted outright. What replaced it is a claim-bound extraction share: when a player pulls value out of a ruin, a share of that value moves from the player's wallet to the claim owner's treasury. That is a transfer, not a mint. The money exists before the share is taken and the same amount exists after, so a claim converts somebody else's work into treasury income and creates none of its own.

The old claim outlived the change by a long way, which is why the correction appears in several places at once. If you find a sentence anywhere promising ruin income, it is stale.

Claiming is a faction matter. Unclaiming needs the owning faction and a rank of elder or above, with staff able to override; before that gate existed any player could strip any faction's claim.

Ruins also feed the writ system. Three objectives read from them: felling a Sentinel, extracting value from a vault, and reaching a given stratum or deeper. The extraction objective is fed from the vault sale's net, so it counts what actually reached you.

Commands and screens

Typing /ruin on its own is context-aware: it opens the dossier for the site you are standing in, or the codex if you are not standing in one. The lookup it uses is the same chunk index the alert layer uses, so "am I in a ruin?" has one answer everywhere in the system.

Every ruins screen is described once as a view model and then rendered twice: a chest interface on Java and a native form on Bedrock, both built from the same object, which is what stops the two platforms drifting apart. If the Bedrock form cannot be sent, you get the Java screen rather than nothing.

Two Bedrock notes. Every navigational hint in the ruins commands is a real, typeable command rather than prose you have to retype from memory, and a Sigil Fragment's identity lives entirely in its lore, including a line naming where the next one is. The decorative glyph chrome on the screens only renders once the server resource pack is applied; without it the screens still work, they just look plainer.