Dreamer FAQ & Starter Guide

The Gameplay Loop

If nothing else sticks, remember this cycle. Everything the mod does builds toward it, and every question below is really a question about one step of it.

Your First Nightmare

When the countdown ends, you're given a choice screen with three trial types. You pick one, nobody assigns it to you. Here's what each one is actually asking of you, in plain terms nobody bothers to say out loud:

Your Aspect is permanently bound once you earn it. There is currently no reroll and no way to switch later, whatever you walk away with is what you're playing for the rest of the run, so pick the path that actually sounds like your kind of fun. The trial type you choose also decides the general flavor of Aspect you're eligible for (a Combat trial draws from Combat-flavored Aspects, and so on), with one exception: the rarest, Divine-tier Aspects aren't locked to any single trial type, they can come out of Combat, Utility, or Support alike. How well you do in the trial shapes your odds at a rarer Aspect too, it isn't a flat coin flip, but the exact mechanics of that are worth discovering for yourself rather than reading off a wiki page.

The Sleeping Pod

This is the single most-asked question in beta so far, and it isn't in the recipe book yet. Here it is, once and for all.

Why you need one: falling asleep any other way (a bed, say) leaves your actual body lying in the waking world, vulnerable to anything that finds it. If that body is destroyed while you're off dreaming, dying again before you wake up is a full reset, rank, Aspect, everything, gone, infection restarting from scratch. A Sleeping Pod removes that risk entirely: there's no killable body left behind, just the pod. A normal death inside the Dream Realm on its own only costs you a chunk of your banked Soul Core shards, not a full reset, it's the pod that keeps it that way.

Craft one, place it somewhere safe (your base, or inside a Citadel), and sleep there every time.

A recipe exists for every wool color, craft with the color you want and place it wherever you like.

Ranks, Soul Cores & Memories

Your Soul Rank gates how much of your Aspect you can use. It climbs as you saturate Soul Cores with shards earned from fighting things above your weight class:

Soul Cores fill from kills (only enemies of a sufficient tier relative to you count) and from converting spare Memories into shards. Losing a PvP fight hands the killer a cut of your shards, so power differences matter in every direction.

Memories are hand-designed relic items found on monsters or out in the world. They live in your Soul Sea (soulbound, tradeable between players, not lost on death), have durability that degrades with use, and become Fragile below 25% (risking destruction the more you push them). Bind your favorites to quick-use slots and that's your Memory Arsenal.

Controls & Keybinds

The mod adds roughly three dozen keybinds, and every single one ships unbound on purpose, so nothing of yours gets silently overwritten. You'll see the full list once on your very first join; if you clicked past it, run /shadow controls any time to bring it back up, or set them yourself under Options → Controls → VoidSpell. Worth binding early:

The Dream Realm

A permanent alternate dimension you reach by sleeping. PvP is on everywhere in it except inside Citadels and other designated safe zones (the waking world stays PvP-off). A few things worth knowing before you dive in:

Corpses surface ambiently across the realm's terrain and are worth hunting down, you'll get a toast notification when one turns up nearby. Outposts are claimable footholds: defeat the guardian holding one and it's yours to run, with members you approve. Citadels (Great Citadels like Bastion among them) are player strongholds and the realm's actual safe zones. If you're not part of one yet, that's where a good Pod placement and a friendly Outpost do the same job.

The realm is built from several distinct regions (the Forgotten Shore, the Chained Isles, Godgrave, Bastion, more planned), and right now the only way between them is the Rift network: fixed portals through a central crossing point, free and exact. There's also the Key of the Rift for a chaotic, one-use trip that drops you somewhere near where you asked instead of exactly there. That's the whole travel system for now, the team knows it's a rough edge and it's on the list to improve.

Once you hit Dreamer rank, expect to occasionally get swept into the realm together with every other Dreamer on the server on a shared clock, an event the mod itself calls the Solstice. It's server-configured and currently turns every 10 Minecraft days by default, so don't let your gear or your Pod situation slide. This is a separate thing from a full server wipe (see §8), the Solstice just pulls you into the realm, it doesn't reset your progress. Gates also spawn out in the waking world as a PvP-free alternative source of the same progression, if the realm isn't your speed that day.

The Dreamscape

First, the thing everyone gets wrong: the Dreamscape is not the Dream Realm. The Dream Realm (§6) is where your progression happens, corpses, Outposts, Citadels, real stakes. The Dreamscape is a separate dimension that holds nothing but colosseums, and it's the one place in the whole mod where players are meant to kill each other for nothing. No shards change hands, no gear drops, no progress moves. It's there to settle arguments and to practise.

It doesn't open to a Dormant soul, you need Awakened rank or higher to get in at all. Everything runs off one top-level command:

You always arrive in the stands, healed and out of reach of the fighting, never in the middle of a brawl. The stands are safe; the sand is not. Stepping down is an opt-in, and it's the only way onto the floor.

Dying here isn't a death. It's caught before it counts: you're restored to full health, carried back to the stands, and you lose nothing, not shards, not durability, not an item on the floor. It won't even burn a Ferryman's Coin or any other death-cheating trick you're holding, because there was never a death to cheat. The only cost is 30 seconds in the seats before the sand will take you again. Note the flip side: while you're carrying a combat tag in the free-for-all you cannot leave the sand, not by walking out, not by ability, not by knockback. Anything that gets you out puts you straight back in, and /dreamscape leave is refused until your blood cools.

Duels are one-on-one, in their own private colosseum away from the free-for-all. Type the duel command on someone's name to offer; they answer with the same command on yours, and an unanswered offer lapses after 30 seconds. The two of you are placed at opposite ends of the sand, so nobody starts in reach. There are 8 duelling grounds, so "every duelling ground is taken" means exactly that, wait for one. Duels are also deliberately weightless in the records: a duel result never touches the leaderboard, precisely so two friends can't trade deaths in private and own the standings.

The board itself ranks the top 10 by kill/death ratio from the public free-for-all only. It shows up on the side of your screen while you're in the realm and disappears when you leave, nobody outside the Dreamscape ever has it on their screen.

Colosseums are raised the first time they're needed, so "still rising, 40% complete" just means try again in a moment. Duels don't survive a disconnect or a restart, and leaving mid-duel forfeits it. If you log out inside the Dreamscape and the server restarts before you're back, you'll wake at your overworld respawn rather than exactly where you left, so don't treat the stands as a place to log off.

From the Beta Chat

A running log of the questions testers actually keep asking that don't fit neatly anywhere above. Updated as new ones come up.

Quick Answers