Project Contract

Status: Active

This page is the non-negotiable contract for review and implementation. If another page drifts away from these rules, fix the docs before treating the drift as real design.

Experience Contract

• The game must stay adventure-first, not chore-first.
• The player should usually know the next useful goal without external wiki help.
• The game should feel fun, challenging, rewarding, and readable without needing deep optimization math.
• Each implementation phase must feel complete enough to play in co-op on its own.

World Contract

• ChonkyCraft must make Minecraft's 3D space matter through living caves, sky routes, Nether frontiers, and later breach or otherworld spaces.
• Progression must keep opening new layers instead of flattening into one best farming zone.
• Worldshift must refresh earlier biomes so old regions do not die after their first clear.

Progression Contract

• Bosses gate the mainline ladder.
• Boss summons must be thematic, readable, and easier to repeat after first discovery.
• Stations must expose what the player can craft, what is missing, and what is still locked.
• Nearby-storage crafting is required, but it must stay local and readable instead of becoming infinite magic storage by default.
• Progression loot from mobs, elites, chests, and bosses must feed real gear, relic, summon, mount, or upgrade goals.

Gear Contract

• Crafted progression gear should not break under ordinary play.
• Gear value must come from crafting, upgrading, and Etchings, not from repair churn.
• Gear should grant useful capabilities such as better jumps, stronger movement, gliding, hovering, and later controlled flight where the ladder allows it.
• The project must not lean on vanilla enchanting-table randomness as the main gear-improvement loop.

Traversal and Mount Contract

• Mounts are a first-class progression pillar.
• Every phase or major progression band must add a traversal payoff through a mount, tack, grapnel, wayshrine, or equivalent route unlock.
• The project must satisfy the broomstick, slime-mount, and dragon-mount fantasies in its own style.
• The chonky cat line is a required side feature, but it must stay optional and not replace the main mount ladder.

Co-op and Interface Contract

• Normal play must be fully workable on a PS5 DualSense.
• Keyboard and mouse should not be required for ordinary play.
• A persistent minimap, a fullscreen world map, and manual waypoints are required.
• Co-op allies should appear clearly on the map stack, preferably as proper skin-face or player-head icons.
• Loot, unlocks, and late-joiner flow must stay co-op friendly.

Failure and Shelter Contract

• Death must not drop inventory.
• Death must not remove experience.
• Normal hostile mobs must not randomly grief player terrain or builds.
• Structural pressure should come through readable fortification rules around doors, gates, fences, and other weak entries.
• Stronger materials must buy more time against pressure.

Identity and Art Contract

• Player-facing names must be original to this project.
• Necesse and Terraria are influence sources, not naming templates.
• Existing Minecraft mobs should be remixed into regional variants before replacing them with unrelated creatures.
• Custom textures must stay visually native to vanilla Minecraft.

Implementation Contract

• Until changed intentionally, the implementation baseline is Minecraft 1.21.1, NeoForge, CurseForge, and Crafty.
• The product split is a CurseForge-first pack plus a custom core mod, with a prepared dedicated-server export.
• The pack should solve infrastructure problems; the custom mod should own the progression identity.
• If code or configs disagree with the docs, update the docs first or in the same change.

Red Lines

• No durability-tax progression loop
• No clone naming from Necesse or Terraria
• No kitchen-sink content stack that floods the ladder with unrelated gear
• No mouse-only custom UI
• No opaque recipe chains that require external spreadsheet play
• No random terrain grief as the main danger model