| “ | There are no travellers in these lands, only servants of the Dark Tower or the White. | ” |
–Faramir, son of Denethor, The Two Towers | ||
Alignment is a core feature of the Mod, a system by which you gain or lose standing among the different factions of Middle-earth.
Various actions performed in Middle-earth will raise or lower your player's alignment with various factions, and this will influence the things you are able to do in the Mod - such as interaction with NPCs, access to faction-specific crafting tables, ability to trade and hire units, making enemies flee from your presence, and eventually the availability of quests. In addition, alignment allows you to pledge service to a certain faction, allowing for you to conquer certain areas for your faction and its allies.
The Alignment Meter[]
The alignment meter shows the selected faction and your current rank for it - "stranger" in the beginning. Use the arrow keys <left> and <right> to display another faction. <Up> and <down> cycles through different groups - Westlands, Rhûn, Harad. The gold ring indicates, how far you made it to the next rank - in the example a bit over halfway from "Esquire" (+500.0) to "Captain" (+1000.0). After you earned or lost alignment, the exact number will be displayed for a short time (see third bar below).
If you are far from a faction's location, then your alignment bar will look much like the one above. However, if you enter a region of Middle-earth where a faction is active, then your alignment bar will show arrows on the left and the right, like the one below:
If you see these arrows, it means this alignment meter is "active", meaning that you're in that faction's Area of Influence, and that killing NPCs will have an effect on your alignment. The arrows will become less visible (see the bar below) as you move further away from the centre, and will disappear entirely when you are completely outside.
If you decide to pledge to the displayed faction, the gold ring will be replaced by a red seal. Note that in the example, it moved slightly up in the next bar, as the player earned a bit of alignment (793.5 -> 794.1):
This means that killing Gundabad Orcs in the Lone-lands for example won't affect the player's alignment with the Rohan, unless there are Rohirrim nearby. This commonly happens with hired armies, or using spawn eggs for example. The alignment meter then displays round bullets instead of arrows beside it (see below), in which case kills count half as much as in the full alignment area.
Individual Faction Details[]
If you head over to the Middle-earth menu (default "L", or "M" in renewed), and click on the "Factions" button, or type "F", you'll come to a number of screens that display a lot of information: General details, ranks, friends and enemies, and the area of influence.
For more detail how to use it, refer to the page about the menu.
Modifying Alignment[]
The player starts off with 0 alignment for all factions (except Utumno, of which the player is always an enemy), so you may wander most regions of Middle-earth without coming to much harm - that is, until you first attack an NPC. Your first NPC kill is bound to influence the way a lot of factions feel about you, so keep this in mind! Of course, you can always undo your actions by losing or gaining alignment with various factions.
Note that regardless of the Area of Influence, killing NPCs will automatically make you lose alignment with their faction. However, in order to gain alignment with a faction, you have to kill its enemies within this area (arrows shown) or within a 24-block radius of one of its members (bullets shown).
Alignment is gained or lost mostly by killing creatures, but also for performing certain actions. The addition of mini-quests has allowed the player to be able to gain alignment for factions completing these quests with the help of the Red Book. For more details refer to the linked pages.
If a player tries to maintain positive alignment with two factions that are mortal enemies, the alignment with both factions will be reduced by the equivalent rate of one kill per hour. This can be disabled in the mod's configuration by
B:"Enable alignment drain"=false
If the player wants to get alignment quickly, there are several ways to do so. You can for example fight invasions. See this article for more details.
Benefits of Alignment[]
Most alignment factions share common benefits for gaining alignment with them, such as:
- Good reputation with NPCs - most NPCs will treat you as a friend and not attack you if you have neutral or positive alignment. (Notable exceptions being the Wood-elves, Trolls, and Mordor, who only trust you above a certain alignment).
- With this comes the ability to talk to the NPCs (they react friendlier).
- And therefore, the ability to accept mini-quests from the NPCs. You need at least neutral alignment for that.
- To be feared by some NPCs if you have less than -500 alignment with their faction (they will flee if the player comes close to them, but some ranged units still shoot arrows or crossbow bolts when the player hasn't arrived the close range but is still in their shooting range). Not all faction NPCs show this behavior, strong faction NPCs like those of Gondor or Mordor won't flee even if a player has less than -500 alignment with them, and even among the NPCs of weaker factions there are some exceptions like Mirk-trolls, Mirkwood spiders, Trolls and Hill-trolls. Utumno creatures will never flee from any player, because of their permanent -66,666 alignment.
- Trading - most traders in the Mod will only trade with you above a certain level of alignment. Blacksmiths even have higher requirements than the non-militaristic professions.
- Unit hiring - the captains in the Mod require a certain alignment before they will let you hire their units. More advanced units require even more alignment, and being pledged to that faction.
- Pledging allegiance becomes available at +100 alignment, allowing conquests for that faction.
- Use of crafting tables - most factions have a crafting table on which you can craft their weapons, equipment, blocks, and other items. These tables can only be used with positive alignment.
- Shields - most factions have a shield which becomes available to wear at +1000 alignment.
- The use of chat titles for a specific faction. These are earned by getting +100 alignment with a certain faction. Most factions have multiple titles, depending on which you prefer. These are a fun way to show your achievements throughout Middle-earth.
The specifics of these things vary between factions. Some factions also have other benefits; see the table below for full details.
Commands[]
The command for altering your alignment is:
/alignment [set|add] <FACTION|all> <amount> [player]
The player tag is optional and can be used to affect someone other than you. To find out the command name of the faction you want, look in the table below or press the tab key after typing /alignment set - it brings up a list of all possible command arguments.
You can also use all for the <FACTION> parameter to affect all factions at once.
The command to toggle, if the Area of Influence matter or not is:
/alignmentZones enable|disable
The command to check other players alignments (mostly for server admins) is:
/alignmentsee <player>
Alignment Entity Registry[]
You can register mobs from the vanilla game or other Mods with the LotR Mod's alignment system.
This is done in the file LOTR_EntityRegistry.txt found within the .minecraft/config folder. That file contains instructions on how to register a mob by adding a line of text to the file.
An example registration line would be:
name=Zombie,faction=GONDOR,targetEnemies=true,bonus=5
which would register vanilla Zombies with the Gondor faction, give them AI to target* enemies of the faction (such as Mordor Orcs), and award players a +5 alignment bonus with the appropriate enemy factions (Mordor and others) upon killing a Zombie.
*The registered mob is given targeting AI, but not attack AI. Thus, it will be able to select appropriate attack targets, but if it is not already capable of attacking a target, it won't actually be able to attack those selected targets.
In the renewed version, a similar effect is achievable using datapacks. NPCs' faction alignments are defined in JSON files; the default alignments for the LotR mod are located in the data/lotr/npcs/entity_settings/ directory. A datapack can edit these alignments or add new ones for other entity types from the vanilla game or other mods.
JSON files for entity type settings must be placed in the relevant namespace for that entity type - this being lotr for the mod's entities, minecraft for vanilla's, and other values for other mods'. For example, a file defining an alignment for the vanilla zombie entity would be located at data/minecraft/npcs/entity_settings/zombie.json.
List of all Alignment Factions[]
For more information on factions outside of how their alignment meter works, see the Factions page.
In the faction relations table below, factions are listed as allies, where killing units from any of these factions will lower alignment with the given faction, neutral, whereby killing units from these factions won't affect your alignment with the given faction, or enemies, where killing units from these factions will increase alignment with the given faction.
Want to know the best way to fight these factions? Look here!
Witch Easter Egg[]
Vanilla Witches give -2 Angmar Alignment when slain in the overworld. This is an Easter Egg, most likely a joke coming from the title 'Witch King of Angmar'.
History[]
Before factions were added in Public Beta 15, alignment was simply divided between "good" and "evil." In previous versions, the player would be awarded alignment for killing mobs of the opposite side, regardless of faction.
After this, until Update 35, alignment was only an integer and just numbers existed instead of ranks. Areas of influence were introduced in Public Beta 32, but the smooth reduction was added in Update 35 together with the pledging and conquest mechanics.
The alignment system, meter and command were ported to renewed in Renewed Snapshot 2.9.
Gameplay mechanics of the Lord of the Rings Mod
Basic Mechanics:
Alignment •
Books •
Crafting •
Equipment Modifiers •
Factions •
Farming The World:
Biomes (Variants) •
Clock •
Compass •
Fast Travel System •
Roads Achievements and Quests:
Achievements • Mini-Quest • Shields • Titles • The Red Book • Tutorial In-Game Events:
Bandits • Bloodmoon • Invasions • Player Respawning • Skirmishes • Thieves Combat:
Banners •
Boss Mechanics •
Combat System •
Conquest •
Fort Besieging Tips •
Fort Defense Tips Brewing:
Portals:
Other / Technical:
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