Clavis in FTB StoneBlock 4

Clavis turns loot chests into a little skill challenge. Every loot chest is locked, and you open it by playing a lockpicking mini-game instead of just clicking it open.^[1]

How well you play decides what you get. A better performance means richer loot, up to nearly double for a perfect result.^[1]

How the difficulty works

The more valuable the loot inside, the harder the lock. Harder locks mean faster speed, more tasks and extra rules that change how the game plays.^[1]

There are 3 main difficulty levels. You can see the level from the color of the smiley in the mini-game interface and from the outline color of the lock floating above the chest. That lets you judge from a distance whether a chest is worth your time.^[1]

Who it is for

If you like exploring, this makes every chest a small event, and high-tier loot feels earned. For pack makers, the mod is meant to keep dungeon loot from handing out strong items too early, which helps balance progression.^[1]

In this pack

The pack ships Clavis 0.2.13 for NeoForge on Minecraft 1.21.1.^[2]

Unverified The sources don't show whether the pack changes any Clavis settings, or exactly where the mod fits in the pack's progression. Treat the behavior above as the mod's general description, not as confirmed pack tuning.

Clavis changes how loot chests work: every loot chest is locked, and you open it by playing a short skill-based mini-game. The better you play, the better the loot, up to nearly double for a perfect result. So the first step in this pack is not crafting anything. It's learning how the mini-game works.^[1]

Step 1: Read the lock before you commit

The difficulty of a lock depends on how valuable the loot inside is. There are 3 main difficulty levels, shown by the color of the smiley in the mini-game interface and by the outline color of the lock floating above the chest. Check that color first and decide whether the chest is worth your time.^[1]

Higher tiers mean faster speed, more tasks and extra rules that change how the game plays. The game also ranks difficulty in 3 tiers, and the tier sets how many rules you face.^[1][3]

Step 2: Play cleanly

Quality decides how good and how plentiful your loot is, and every mistake lowers it. Slow, accurate clicks beat fast, sloppy ones.^[3]

Some rules are designed to trip you up. A few examples:^[3]

• Mood Swings: the pointer changes direction after every click.^[3]
• Full Throttle: the pointer speeds up after each click, then slowly calms down over time.^[3]
• Fake Pin: a decoy pin appears, and clicking it deactivates all the pins you already activated.^[3]
• Shockwave: each click pushes away all meteors near the reflected cursor.^[3]
• Swap Mousepos: after each click, your real cursor swaps places with the reflected one.^[3]

Step 3: Use a lock pick on the tough chests

The Lock Pick is your shortcut. Use it on a locked chest and it unlocks the chest while keeping the maximum quality of the loot inside, as if you had finished the mini-game without a single mistake. It is consumed on use, so save it for a high-tier lock with nasty rules.^[3]

Unverified I couldn't confirm how to get a lock pick in this pack. No recipe for Clavis items and no quest involving the mod could be verified, so check in-game before you plan around having one.

Clavis is a small mod with one big idea: loot chests are locked, and you open them by playing a skill-based lockpicking mini-game. It has no machines, multiblocks, power, fluids or item automation in the sources I have. All of its depth lives in the mini-game itself.^[1]

How a chest works

Every loot chest is locked, and the better you play, the better the loot. A perfect run gives up to nearly double the loot. Making mistakes during the playthrough lowers the quality value, which controls both the quality and the quantity of the loot you get at the end.^[1][3]

Difficulty tiers

A lock's difficulty comes from the average value of the loot that could appear in that container. Richer loot means a harder game: faster speed, more tasks and extra rules that change how it plays.^[1][3]

There are 3 main difficulty levels. You can tell them apart by the color of the smiley in the mini-game interface and by the outline color of the lock floating above the chest. That lets you decide before you start whether a chest is worth your time. The tier also sets how many rules the mini-game uses.^[1][3]

The interface readouts

• Difficulty: based on the average value of the loot that could appear in the container, ranked in 3 tiers.^[3]
• Quality: decides the quality and quantity of the loot generated when you finish. Mistakes reduce it.^[3]
• Time: how long the game has been running. The in-game description says it means nothing, then jokes that the whole world will explode at 1 minute. Treat that as a joke.^[3]

Extra rules

Higher tiers add rules that twist the basic game. The rule names are grouped into a gear style, built around a pointer, and a mirror style, built around meteors and a reflected cursor. The sources don't say which rules appear at which tier.^[3]

Gear rules

• Fake Pin: a fake pin moves to a random position after each click. Clicking it deactivates all previously activated pins.^[3]
• Full Throttle: the pointer speeds up after each click and slowly settles back down over time.^[3]
• Mood Swings: the pointer changes direction after each click.^[3]
• Nauseous Carousel: from time to time the game field slowly rotates in a random direction.^[3]
• Self Destruction: the pointer periodically overheats, and any click while it is hot takes away an extra health point.^[3]

Mirror rules

• Fake Meteor: a fake meteor moves to a random position after each click. Clicking it restores all previously destroyed meteors.^[3]
• Hot Meteor: a random meteor periodically heats up, and clicking it removes an extra health point.^[3]
• Rotate: the reflecting mirror periodically spins in a random direction.^[3]
• Shockwave: each click creates a shockwave that pushes away all meteors near the reflected cursor.^[3]
• Swap Mouse Position: after each click, the real cursor swaps places with the reflected one.^[3]

Skipping the mini-game

The Lock Pick unlocks a locked chest without making you play. It preserves the maximum loot quality, as if you had finished the mini-game with no mistakes. It is consumed on use, so save it for a chest with rich loot behind a hard lock.^[3]

Unverified The sources don't show how to obtain a lock pick in this pack, and they include no recipe or config for the mod. Any pack-specific tuning of difficulty, loot or lock behavior is unconfirmed.

Clavis doesn't have a tier ladder in this pack that I can confirm. What the pack does give us is one quest that introduces the mod, so this section follows that quest and where it sits in the quest book.^[4]

Where the quest book introduces Clavis

Clavis shows up in the Getting Started chapter, which is chapter 3 of 22 in the Echoes of History group. The quest is "Loot Chests" quest, and it is a simple checkmark quest, so you don't have to hand anything in.^[4]

It comes right after "A Token of the Mindless" quest, where you turn a cured Villager into a Worker Token with the Echo Encoder. That quest sits after "The First World Craft" quest, which in turn follows "Bring Me To Life" quest. So you meet Clavis once you've cured a Villager and made your first Echo Encoder.^[4]

After the Worker Token quest the chapter branches. "Putting Villagers To Work" quest also unlocks from the same quest, so Loot Chests runs alongside the Unearther automation line rather than gating it.^[4]

What the quest tells you

• Chests are now locked behind a lockpicking minigame.^[4]
• You line up the needle with the locks and left click to unlock them.^[4]
• The fewer misses and the faster you finish, the better the loot.^[4]
• If you fail, the chest still unlocks, but with reduced rewards.^[4]
• Lock Picks let you skip the minigame completely.^[4]

Unverified I couldn't confirm any further Clavis tiers, Lock Pick recipes or difficulty levels from the pack's data, so none are described here.

The recipe dump shows one recipe that connects Clavis with another mod, and the pack added it itself. It uses the Lock Pick together with the Spectre Ingot from Irregular Implements, plus Copper Ingot and Lava from vanilla Minecraft.^[5]

This is a Custom Machinery custom machine recipe, so you won't make it at a normal crafting table. Open the recipe block above for the exact in-pack details.^[5]

The recipe dump shows no other recipe that links Clavis with another mod, so this is the only integration these sources confirm.^[5]

Clavis only shows up in one quest in the pack, and it's an easy one. It sits in the Getting Started chapter, which is chapter 3 of 22 in the quest book, in the group called Echoes of History.^[4]

Loot Chests

The quest is "Loot Chests" quest, and its only task is a checkmark, so you just read it and tick it off. The quest text explains that Clavis adds special interaction with locked chests: they are now locked behind a lockpicking minigame.^[4]

Here's how the minigame works, as the quest describes it. You line up the needle with the locks and left click to unlock them. The fewer misses and the faster you finish, the better the loot.^[4]

Where it sits in the chapter

"Loot Chests" quest comes right after "A Token of the Mindless" quest. That quest in turn follows "The First World Craft" quest, the World Engine crafting step that gets you an Echo Encoder.^[4]

"Putting Villagers To Work" quest also unlocks after "A Token of the Mindless" quest, so the two quests sit side by side as branches from the same point in the chapter. The sources don't show any other quest that follows the chest quest.^[4]

FTB StoneBlock 4 1.21.0 ships Clavis 0.2.13, the NeoForge build for Minecraft 1.21.1. The mod has been in the pack since StoneBlock 4 1.0.0 or earlier. Here are the notable changes from the mod's own changelogs, newest first.^[2]

Clavis releases

• 0.2.13 (the version in this pack): removed leftover logging.^[2][6]
• 0.2.11: fixed the server hanging forever in some cases.^[7]
• 0.2.10: added compatibility with Lootr 1.10.35.96 and later.^[8]
• 0.2.9: fixed an issue with Lootr on NeoForge.^[9]
• 0.2.7: the changelog only says it fixes issue number 4, with no description of what that issue was.^[10]
• 0.2.5: added platform-specific methods and fixed items not appearing during difficulty calculation.^[11]
• 0.2.3: fixed a bug that had been causing crashes in some mods.^[12]

If you run a server, the 0.2.11 fix is the one to care about, since it deals with a server hanging forever. The Lootr changes in 0.2.9 and 0.2.10 are the other thing to look at, as they were about keeping Clavis working alongside that mod.^[7][8][9]

Unverified No pack changelog entries for Clavis were available, so which StoneBlock 4 release moved the pack from one Clavis version to another is unverified.