Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-31507215-20180925045433

""Moon-letters are rune-letters, but you cannot see them," said Elrond, "not when you look straight at them. They can only be seen when the moon shines behind them, and what is more, with the more cunning sort it must be a moon of the same shape and season as the day when they were written. The dwarves invented them and wrote them with silver pens, as your friends could tell you.""

- The Hobbit

As you may have guessed from the quote, this suggestion is about moon-letters. They were only mentioned briefly in The Hobbit, and would not be a particularly game-changing feature for the mod, but I think that the addition of moon-letters would improve the mod's immersion and add to the (already quite high) "WOW" factor of the mod.

Summary
A brief summery of my suggestion is as follows: moon-letters would be a new kind of text for books (mainly, if not exclusively, lore books) that would only be visible under certain conditions relating to the moon.

If such a thing would not be possible (or worth the effort), please scrap this idea, and stop reading. If not, please continue reading! (I will try to organize my thoughts in an orderly fashion, but I don't make any promises.)

Obtaining (In-game)
In my opinion, moon-letters should be exclusive to lore books, considering that they were made by dwarven scribes of old.

However, if the mod-team wishes to make moon-letters able to be written by players, here is my suggestion as to how to do it:

A new item, the Ithildin Pen (or some better name, if you think of one), would be added. It would look like a swan feather (or just a normal feather) and would have a mithril-y sheen or tint to it.

Ithildin pens could be bought from Dwarf Smiths (until a more fitting trader is added). If the pen should be craftable, as well, they would be crafted by putting one pile of Ithildin in the center of a Dwarven (or, perhaps, Blue Dwarven) crafting table, surrounded by up to eight swan feathers.

Ithildin pens could be crafted with a book and quill (or with a book, feather, and ink sac) to create a new type of book and quill, with the capability of writing moon-letters. (The new book and quill may have no obvious difference, a different item name, the enchantment shimmer, or any number of other slightly different qualities.) To write moon-letters instead of standard letters, the writer would click a new button on the GUI. If the button is clicked once more, it would type normal letters again. A signed ithildin book would have no difference from a normal written book.

Adding to Lore Books
There are at least a few ways that moon-letters could be added to lore books. There may be more, but the first two that pop to mind are
 * 1) As a formatting code ("§i", perhaps) that can be typed into a lore text just like other formatting codes
 * 2) As a lore text compiling function similar to {choose: a\b\c}

This would allow lore text contributors to add moon-letters to their texts without too much trouble. Discretion would be required, of course; we don't want books written completely in moon-letters.

Visuals
When viewed in a book, moon-letters would have two appearances: visible and invisible. Moon-letters would be visible when the circumstances are right (see next section), and would probably appear as a light bluish-grey text. Otherwise, they would be considered invisible and could be actually invisible, or could just use the white text color, which blends in really well with the default book background.

Circumstances
Whether or not moon-letters would be visible would depend on either the moon or the date. The four most reasonable options that I can see, in order of complexity, are:
 * 1) Moon-letters are visible on any night.
 * 2) Moon-letters are visible only when there is a full moon.
 * 3) Moon-letters are visible only when the phase of the moon matches the moon's phase on the day they were written.
 * 4) Moon-letters are visible only on the same date as they were written.

If the visibility is dependent on date or phase, the time/phase for player-written books would be the day the book is signed, and would be a "#" value in the text of lore books. For the sakes of ease and enjoyment alike, I would suggest the second of the four options, with what counts as "night" being from tick 29k through tick 46k.

I hope that all makes sense. If you have questions, or notice that I missed something, post it below and I will do my best to fix it!

Thanks for your time!

 