Gems and Runes
Every forged item carries up to three gems and three runes. Each one grants a fixed bonus and charges a fixed cost.
At most three sockets, three rune slots
A forged item carries at most three gem sockets and three rune slots. How many gem sockets are actually open depends on the quality it left the quench with, from none at Crude up to all three at Ancient Resonant. They live on the item itself, as the data keys SOCKET_0 to SOCKET_2 and RUNE_0 to RUNE_2, alongside the item's quality, material, creator and history. A gem goes into a socket. A rune is engraved into a rune slot.
Nothing here is rolled. There is no RNG anywhere in the forging system, so what a gem's row says it does is exactly what it does on your item, every time. That also means the decision is entirely yours to get right: a socket you fill badly is a socket you filled badly, not bad luck.
Every row carries a cost
There are thirteen rows in total: six gems and seven runes. Each row carries three terms.
- Boon, the bonus you are buying.
- Bane, the cost you pay for it. It is mandatory and it is never zero.
- Proc, an effect that fires in combat. Not every row needs a distinct one.
The mandatory bane is enforced rather than promised: a self-check over the catalogue refuses a row whose cost is missing, and a second arm refuses a stat name the attribute writer cannot actually map. That second check exists because of a real defect it would have caught. Before the rework, two of the six gems named stats nothing could resolve, so their bonuses were silently dropped and two gems did nothing at all for the entire life of the feature.
Boon and bane are written through one key-scoped attribute writer, in a single pass. There is no separate code path that could apply the bonus and forget the cost.
The six gems
Gems go into sockets and are removed from sockets. They do not accumulate instability, which is the difference that matters when you are deciding between a gem and a rune for the same item.
| Gem | Bonus | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Ruby | +1.5 attack damage | 0.20 attack speed |
| Void Shard | +2.5 attack damage | 2 points of armour |
| Pearl Core | movement speed | knockback resistance |
| Emerald | read the row with /forge gems | read the row with /forge gems |
| Sapphire | read the row with /forge gems | read the row with /forge gems |
| Echo Crystal | read the row with /forge gems | read the row with /forge gems |
Three of those rows are quoted here with their exact terms. The other three are deliberately not, because this page will not print a number it cannot trace, and the catalogue is the only authority for them. /forge gems is generated from that same catalogue, so the screen in game and the numbers on your item can never disagree.
Reading the trade
The Ruby and the Void Shard are the clearest illustration of what a socket is for. The Ruby buys 1.5 damage and pays for it in swing speed, so it rewards a weapon you already swing fast and punishes a slow one twice over. The Void Shard buys more damage than any other row and pays in armour, which means it is a choice about how a fight ends rather than a flat upgrade. The Pearl Core trades stability for movement: you arrive faster and you get moved further when something hits you.
Gems and runes are metadata-only entries in the custom item registry, which holds 122 entries in total, 58 of them craftable and 64 metadata-only. No recipe produces a gem. They arrive as drops, hung off mining and combat, so they reach you while you are playing rather than at a bench.
The seven runes
A rune is engraved rather than slotted. You hold the matching rune stone, stand at a forge and run /forge rune engrave. The engraving is the reason runes are the heavier commitment: every one of them adds instability to the item, and instability is permanent until something removes it.
| Rune | Rune stone | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Flame | bl_rune_stone_flame | boon, bane and proc from the catalogue |
| Frost | bl_rune_stone_frost | boon, bane and proc from the catalogue |
| Void | bl_rune_stone_void | boon, bane and proc from the catalogue |
| Ward | bl_rune_stone_ward | boon, bane and proc from the catalogue |
| Echo | bl_rune_stone_echo | boon, bane and proc from the catalogue |
| Lightning | bl_rune_stone_lightning | boon, bane and proc from the catalogue |
| Poison | bl_rune_stone_poison | boon, bane and proc from the catalogue |
All seven runes obey the same rules as the gems: a mandatory non-zero cost, one writer for both terms, no randomness. Their exact figures print in /forge sockets, which is generated from the catalogue for the same reason the gem screen is.
Engraving is also the Runesmith's work. A successful engraving awards 40 job XP and no coins, which is currently the profession's only XP source. That is worth knowing before you pick the job.
The six proc effects
Beyond the flat stat trade, a socketed row can carry a proc: an effect that fires during combat. There are six of them.
| Proc | Shape |
|---|---|
| Shock | Chains from your target outward, capped at 3 targets, with a lightning visual |
| Leech | Returns something to you off the hit |
| Fracture | Applies a debilitating state to what you hit |
| Concussion | Applies a debilitating state to what you hit |
| Siphon | Returns something to you off the hit |
| Ward | Applies a protective state to you |
Underneath, all six are built from potion effects, heals and one lightning visual, entirely server-side. That is a deliberate choice for Bedrock parity: nothing here depends on a client-side particle or a resource pack, so a Bedrock player sees the same fight a Java player sees.
The rules the procs live under
Two limits are absolute, and both are checked by a build guard rather than left to good intentions.
- No proc deals damage directly. A damage effect firing on a damage event is a re-entrancy loop, and for anything with an area it is a claim bypass wearing an ability's costume. Shock chains without calling a damage routine.
- No proc can fire another proc. A single latch is checked as the first statement of the firing routine and released in a
finallyblock, so an effect that throws cannot leave the whole system switched off for the rest of the server's life.
Procs share a cooldown of 60 ticks, which is 3 seconds. The cooldown table is cleaned up when it is read, not on a timer. Nothing about the proc system adds a repeating server task: every proc hangs off an event that already fires, at monitor priority and skipping cancelled events, which is why the whole feature costs nothing while you are not fighting.
Instability and corruption
Every engraving raises the item's instability, tracked on the item as TOTAL_INSTABILITY. Past a threshold, the item can corrupt. This is the one place in the socket system where you are taking on risk over time rather than paying a flat price at the moment of the decision.
What corruption actually costs you
Read this carefully, because it is easy to assume the wrong thing. When an item corrupts, three things happen.
- All three rune slots are erased.
- The item's quality drops by one band.
- Instability resets.
Your sockets are not touched. The gems stay in, unharmed. Corruption is a rune problem, and gems are exempt from it entirely, which is another reason to think of the two systems as different kinds of commitment rather than two flavours of the same one.
An earlier draft of the /forge sockets screen described corruption as costing you a socket and the gem in it. It never did. The screen was corrected to match the code, because a screen that tells you a price the game does not charge is worse than no screen.
Pushing the threshold back
Instability is not something you simply endure. Several systems reduce it or remove it.
| Source | Effect |
|---|---|
| Runesmith rank | Rune instability reduced by 5% per 5 levels, reaching 20% at Legend |
| Archmage mastery | A further 10% rune instability reduction, passive |
| Stabilise ability | Removes 1.0 instability, on a 120 second cooldown |
| Lorekeeper mastery | Stabilise removes 2.0 instead of 1.0 |
| Rune Stability faction buff | Tiered reduction, shown in the buff list with your current tier |
A Runesmith at Legend with Archmage and Lorekeeper is running a substantially different risk curve from someone engraving on a fresh account. If you intend to put three runes on something you care about, the profession is the cheapest insurance available.
Fitting, removing and reading a socket
Four commands cover the whole system. All four are plain chat, which means they work identically on Bedrock with no form or item screen in the way.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
/forge gem insert <slot> | Puts the held gem into socket 0, 1 or 2 of the item you are carrying |
/forge gem remove <slot> | Clears that socket |
/forge rune engrave | Engraves the held rune stone, adding its instability |
/forge gems | Prints every gem: bonus, drawback, effect and where to find it |
/forge sockets | Prints how the system works, including the runes and the corruption rules |
The two reference screens are the point of the pair. Before the rework the gems' numbers did not exist anywhere a player could read them; they were literals buried in code, and the config file that looked like it held them could not have expressed a stat modifier even if somebody had written one there. /forge gems and /forge sockets are generated from the single catalogue that also drives the item, so the description and the behaviour cannot drift apart.
/forge help opens a fifteen topic guide with pages for gems and runes among the rest, if you would rather browse than query.
Removing a gem is a destructive operation on the gem, and that is a known rough edge that has been flagged rather than smoothed. Plan the socket before you fill it.
What survives an anvil, a repair and a reforge
A socketed item is not a fragile item. The forge operations mutate the metadata already on the item rather than rebuilding a fresh one, so sockets, runes, instability, quality, creator, history and lore all carry through.
| Operation | Effect on sockets and runes |
|---|---|
| Enchanting table | Kept. Forged items are enchantable natively, and enchantment lines render above the forged stat block |
| Anvil, book or combine | Kept. The result is built from a copy of the left input, then only what the anvil actually produced is overlaid |
| Anvil rename | Kept |
| Grindstone | Forged identity kept; the grindstone still strips enchantments as normal |
/forge repair | Kept |
/forge reforge | Kept, and no stat is rerolled |
Reforge does not reroll
This is worth stating plainly, because the command's old message implied otherwise and the implication was wrong. /forge reforge applies an additive temper from a temper alloy held in your off hand. It adds damage, durability, mining speed or an enchanting discount. It does not reroll your stats, and it never will, for a concrete reason: two of the five inputs that produced your item's stats are not recorded on the item, so a recompute could not know the range it was rolling inside and would quietly nerf every forged item on the server. Addition needs none of that information and can only move a number one way.
The defect this used to have
Earlier builds carried a real bug here. The item builder removed attribute modifiers by attribute in a blanket sweep, which wiped every writer's modifiers including your gems, while the socket data and the slot lore survived. The item then lied about its gems. The fix keeps the blanket removal, which was also doing the job of suppressing the base material's own defaults, but snapshots the modifiers first and re-adds everything that was not the builder's own. One namespace per writer is now the rule.
Limits, and what is not built
The socket rework shipped as part of the forge release and is marked code-written, not server-verified. Every self-check listed on this page was driven offline and mutation-proven at the stated counts, and the build guard that enforces the two proc rules exits clean. None of that is the same as having run on the live server, and this page will not tell you otherwise.
Known limits
- At most three sockets and three rune slots. There is no fourth of either, and no way to buy one.
- Removing a gem destroys it. Flagged as a rough edge, not yet changed.
- Corruption is rune-scoped only. A socket-scoped corruption was designed and deliberately not built. It is a live balance change with nothing gating it, and the tail of a long run is the wrong place to introduce one. It stays flagged.
- Procs never deal damage directly. If you were expecting shock to be a damage chain, it is not, and that is a safety property rather than a tuning decision.
- Three gem rows are not quoted here. Query them in game rather than trusting a number this page cannot trace.
Where to check
Run /forge gems and /forge sockets on the server itself. Both are generated from the same catalogue the mechanics read, so they are the authority, and if this page ever disagrees with them, they are right.
Java connects at blacklight-network.de. Bedrock connects at blacklight-network.de on port 19132. The server runs Paper 26.1.2.