📖Designing Boundaries of the Arcanum

🥅Main Goals

This expansion was born not long after the prior one completed. We knew we had a ton of space left to explore, and some of the core concepts arose very early. For example, the first design chat mention of Impetuses was on November 16th, 2023.

Around that time, we set a primary goal of broadly filling out options. Many enchant slots still didn’t offer interesting choices, and leggings and boots lacked unique enchant sets. The Valor update wasn't initially planned, but we were feeling confident in the enchant design quality, so when Valor content came up during a design chat in mid-2024, our desire to update that space became clear.

While we didn’t start off designing around a specific vision statement, by the time we figured things out, the main goal was clear: modernize and expand our offerings to enable truly diverse late-game builds.

Finally, there’s the expansion title: Boundaries of the Arcanum. We considered other names (“Wild Magic” was around for a while early on) before settling on what seemed to best represent the intended lore and vibe - the arcane matrix which encapsulates our world, now fragmented, allowing the influential light from other realms to penetrate, forever leaving their mark on Silver Springs.

🧠High-level design explanations

🏅Enchant tiers

An important part of our enchant design philosophy relies on grouping them into tiers, of which we recognize three:

• 🥇Tier 1: The big groups. Paradigms, Avatars, Impetuses, and Aphelions. These are unique enchants which can break normal complexity rules and should feel thematically special even if behaviorally simple.

• 🥈Tier 2: High complexity. Enchants which are not part of a tier 1 group, but are unique due to high systemic complexity, such as Ear Collector, or Sapiovore previously.

• 🥉Tier 3: Mid-to-low complexity. This makes up most Runecrafted enchants, which should feel approachable and the most vanilla-like, such as Strafing.

This should shed light on not only our approach, but areas which could change in the future. For example, from a design purist standpoint, many tier 2 enchants shouldn’t exist, as they break complexity rules without justifying it by being tier 1. Being pragmatic, it’s fine or even good to break some design rules in moderation, but it’s a space we’re mindful of.

✏️Items and enchant categories

An issue we sought to correct during this expansion was the lack of a firm design direction for specific items and enchant categories. These should feel distinct, but many didn’t previously offer enough variety or unique outputs. Here are a few examples of such spaces and how we approached them:

• Tridents were already designed to feel visceral, which we leaned into further while deepening them as thematic oceanic weapons with big calls to action.

• Crossbows are designed to feel very tactile, with strong AoE to make them unique among ranged weapons.

• Axes lacked a clear distinction from swords. We sought to emphasize their in-your-face aggression, especially via their sweeping enchants which are now very different from swords (compare Chainsaw to Coup de Grâce).

• Some AoE enchants were bafflingly single-target focused. We removed these to introduce designs with more AoE potential like Dreadnought and Gatling.

🌟Why mythical enchants?

It's important to us to avoid explicit, broad power creep in our modern content. It’s impossible to avoid entirely - even new equal strength content creeps power for versatile players by expanding their options - but we’ve avoided adding an entire new top tier of gear, for example.

This is easy to satisfy for Valor armors, which can simply compete with Netherite, but is difficult for other Valor relics - how can Karru’Val not simply outclass other bows when there’s only one bow tier?

Mythical enchants were our solution. They allow for relics which make meaningful tradeoffs to access unique forms of power, and are a great chance to create unique thematic experiences. To the latter point, mythical enchants tend to be a great use case for tier 2 enchants.

✏️Design of Aphelions & Impetuses

The new tier 1 enchant sets are the centerpieces of this expansion. They make up exactly 33% of the new enchants, and epitomize the expansion’s design pillars both in the build diversity they enable and the multiversal influence they represent, so both groups deserve a space outlining their exact design goals.

🪐Aphelions

The Aphelions were designed to add alternate forms of iconic custom content. Each takes a mechanic thematically linkable to its planet and rethinks it in the same space, creating "echo fighters" of "the greatest hits of SSS".

Many relate to their planet's physical traits, and many planets were personified by interpreting what they’d influence at their aphelion: Mars most longing yet ever failing to house life, humanity furthest from its sun basking in horrors on Earth, and Pluto and Charon in their most private dance. The Lexicon lore helps illustrate this, highlighting each planet’s emotions at its aphelion.

Raceway, Aspects, R.E.D., Envy, meteors, Tome, socketing, Howling, Grasshopper, Cerberus. All have rich histories; even those added recently spiritually succeed notable content. These icons stand tall in our world, and through the torn runic matrix, each planet eclipses what most resembles it, its pull providing influence at their shared aphelion - at their furthest reach, most abstract and foreign.

⚡Impetuses

The Impetuses were designed to buff weak or missing playstyles into primary use. While many provide power in standard gameplay, they're optimal when "doing that deity's thing", "flipping the switch" to enable a gameplay style which wasn’t previously viable.

Silver Springs has much Grecian influence: hybrids, Plimmýra, and now Enelysios, reborn as the Sparks locale before our eyes, spurred by a great influence. But what, or who? Perhaps runic fluctuations have long inspired our world's discoverers, granting glimpses of other realms?

Mounts, high strategy, potions, stealth, magic, tinkering, tricksters, mobility fighters, dogfighting. All playstyles which Minecraft had potential for, but didn’t deliver. These deities championed these now lost arts, and through the torn runic matrix, their deep and powerful mythos have physically manifested in our world as the Impetuses - each of them urging and inspiring you, giving you the impetus, to return glory to their craft.

❌Failed designs & learnings

It’s not all sunshine and roses. Some things took hours of discussions to nail down. It would take too much space to cover everything, but below we've highlighted the most notable difficulties we faced.

🪐Aphelion of Saturn

Originally, Saturn eclipsed Sapiovore and let you permanently consume curses to cast Eldritch spells. Sound familiar?

This of course eventually became Earth, but we got very stuck trying to make it work as Saturn, even at times losing the heart of the great initial concept in trying to fit Saturn’s rings into the design. "Wake up babe, time to discuss Saturn!" became a tired joke within the team.

We eventually moved this idea to Earth, which fits better thematically, and mostly reverted to the original design, though tweaked to fit the R.E.D. The exercise taught us a lot about successful Aphelion design, namely needing to retain the essence of the eclipsed mechanic (in this case, unarmed for the eclipsed R.E.D.), and only cost us a little sanity.

🛡️Shields & Athena

Early on, we had >10 shield enchants designed to make them viable "weapons" for mobile scrappy fighters, à la Loader of Risk of Rain.

While the idea was fun, we quickly realized that it was the wrong way to introduce a fighting style, as it would eat a ton of design space and turn shields into something they’re not. We instead focused on making shields fun to offhand, while subtly enabling scrappy mobility fighters (Poseidon, Tempest, etc.)

Meanwhile, we got distracted trying to design Athena around shields, which fell apart when remembering the point of Impetuses - buff weak playstyles. Shields alone aren’t a playstyle, and if weak, it would be because our shield content is weak, meaning we should buff that content, not use an Impetus as a band-aid. We eventually recognized this and refocused Athena on strategic melee combat, which is a better space for an Impetus and a better fit for Athena.

🔱Tridents

The melee vs. range issue

We initially aimed to add multiple enchants skewed towards buffing melee tridents. This was fruitless, given there’s nothing exciting about melee trident attacks, which should have been obvious. It works better to focus on their unique ranged outputs and only add melee hooks when it fits naturally (which is rare).

Mutiny and heroism

Trident enchant categories also gave us trouble. We spent ages trying to ideate a new trajectory enchant, and planned for one named Mutiny, which would make the trident return only by “proving yourself” in one of a few ways, but in exchange you'd get buffs. The flavor of repeatedly re-earning your mutinous crew's respect was fun, but it filled an odd design space as a tier 2 enchant that felt less new and more like eclipsed Loyalty, so we scrapped it. Perhaps it will return in a different form one day.

The heroism category was also tough. We wanted a Channeling mutual, but got stuck viewing the core concept as "unique buffs in rare scenarios" (like Channeling's lightning in thunderstorms). An example design is Valhallan, which could resurrect you in rare elongated combat scenarios. While cool, these designs were too niche or too gameable. We finally had the "duh" moment: the appropriately niche, not gameable scenario is thunderstorms - we didn't need to find a new one. Heraclean was born shortly thereafter. A good lesson in not overthinking things!

📿Rune of Virtues

In a fervent design session in late January, we almost added a Rune of Virtues, hoping to fill the lacking rune representation of morals, conscience, and the id. The rune could work well for things like Paradigms or to represent heroics (Heraclean), pacifying (Shrink Ray), etc. We even discussed potential locales (Cultist HQ!)

We were split, but ultimately felt the rune didn't add enough meaning to the system to be worth the design space it would take up, so we decided against it, which we're very glad about in hindsight.

🗓️The future

📖Runecrafting going forward

We've called this the final Runecrafting expansion, which is indeed our plan, but that doesn't mean Runecrafting will stagnate. It's a key fixture of the server which affects and is affected by our other content and the vanilla game itself.

Our expectation is that Runecrafted enchant changes will always be part of our design and balancing going forward, especially in response to changes to other content. For example, maybe we'll eventually remove some enchants via moving their mechanics into other spaces. Or perhaps Mojang will add a new weapon and we'll design a slew of new enchants for it, like we just did for maces. Only time will tell with these things, but we're committed to keeping Runecrafting modern in response to any changes to the Silver Springs experience.

❓What's next?

We've already announced a bunch of upcoming content for this map. I'm also happy to share that we're already in early ideation stages of next map's big content updates. We're not ready to share anything there yet, but that content doesn't rely on secrecy in the same way as the new enchants did, so there's a fair chance you'll hear about it well before the next reset. No promises though - we have to see how things evolve first.

If you made it this far, thanks so much for reading and for your commitment to Silver Springs!❤️