Objectives

An objective is one box to tick inside a quest. A quest completes when all of its objectives reach their target, at which point its rewards pay out.

Every objective is a JSON object with a type and whatever fields that type needs:

{ "type": "neroquests:collect_item", "item": "minecraft:iron_ingot", "count": 10 }

Everything on this page is evaluated on the server. The client only ever displays what the server tells it, so no amount of client-side fiddling can move a counter.

How progress moves#

Objectives advance in one of two ways, and knowing which is which explains most of their behaviour:

A measured objective is recomputed rather than tallied, which makes it impossible to farm — you cannot cycle the same ten iron ingots through your inventory and be credited twenty. The trade-off is that collect_item falls back when you spend the items; the other measured types are milestones and stay ticked once reached.

A counted objective is a running total that nothing takes away. Craft the items, then use them: the progress stands.

Measuring runs on a once-a-second sweep, and again immediately after a craft or a kill. Because recounting is idempotent, that cadence only affects how quickly the quest book catches up — never what the answer is.

Objective types#

neroquests:collect_item#

Have this many matching items on you at once.

{ "type": "neroquests:collect_item", "item": "minecraft:iron_ingot", "count": 10 }
{ "type": "neroquests:collect_item", "tag": "c:ingots/iron", "count": 10 }

Exactly one of item / tag must be given; declaring both, or neither, drops the quest with a warning.

Counted slots are the whole player inventory: hotbar, main inventory, off-hand and worn equipment. Chests, shulker boxes and backpacks are not counted — you have to be carrying it. Give the items away and the counter drops again.

neroquests:craft_item#

Make this many matching items. Same fields as collect_item.

{ "type": "neroquests:craft_item", "tag": "c:ingots/iron", "count": 32 }

"Craft" means taking the output of a result slot, which covers the crafting grid, a furnace/smoker/blast-furnace output, the stonecutter, the smithing table and a villager trade. That is deliberate: a quest asking for 20 iron ingots crafted should be satisfied by smelting them.

The tally never falls; spending what you made does not undo the progress.

neroquests:kill_entity#

Kill this many matching creatures.

{ "type": "neroquests:kill_entity", "entity": "minecraft:zombie", "count": 10 }
{ "type": "neroquests:kill_entity", "tag": "minecraft:skeletons", "count": 10 }

The kill goes to whoever the game credits with it: the attacker if that is a player, otherwise the player behind an arrow, a pet or another indirect kill. A creature that dies of fall damage, lava or old age credits nobody.

neroquests:reach_dimension#

Set foot in a dimension.

{ "type": "neroquests:reach_dimension", "dimension": "nerospace:greenxertz" }

Sticky: it ticks the first time you are seen there and stays ticked after you leave. This is how a quest reacts to another mod's worlds — a Nerospace planet, a modded Nether analogue — without NeroQuests depending on that mod at all.

neroquests:gate_open#

A Neroland Core progression gate must be open for you.

{ "type": "neroquests:gate_open", "gate": "nerolandcore:reached_orbit" }

Sticky, and picked up the moment Core reports the change rather than on the next sweep.

This is the ecosystem's universal join. Every Nero mod drives Core's gates as a player passes its own milestones, so a quest can require "has reached orbit" or "has founded a colony" while NeroQuests depends on nothing but Core.

Not to be confused with a quest's visible_gate, which hides the entire quest until the gate opens; this is one tick-box inside an already-visible quest.

A gate id that no mod defines simply never opens — Core treats an unknown gate as a closed player-scope gate, so there is no missing-content degradation here (see below). Check your gate ids.

neroquests:quest_complete#

Another quest must be complete for the same holder.

{ "type": "neroquests:quest_complete", "quest": "mypack:chapter1/wake_up" }

Not the same as a prerequisite: a prerequisite decides whether a quest is available, while this is one of the boxes to tick inside an already-available quest.

Completing a quest re-checks every other quest that names it, so finishing one can finish the next in the same instant. Quest completion never reverses, so these chains always settle.

neroquests:custom_event#

Another mod reported that one of its tracked quantities crossed a threshold.

{ "type": "neroquests:custom_event", "channel": "nerocolonies:oxygen", "direction": "rising" }
{ "type": "neroquests:custom_event", "channel": "nerocolonies:structures", "min_value": 3,
  "audience": "everyone" }

Where gate_open waits on your progress, this waits on the world's. The publishing mod fires the crossing on Neroland Core's shared event bus and NeroQuests listens, so neither mod imports the other and a quest can be written against a mod that is not even installed.

Counted, and the tally never falls. A crossing is an event, not a state you can re-measure, so one that happened while you were logged out is simply missed — the same way a kill nobody made credits nobody.

rising does not mean "good". Core defines it as "the value crossed upward", which is a recovery on nerocolonies:oxygen and a worsening on nerotech:pollution.

audience is the field to get right. A crossing names a place or a system and never a person — that is a privacy rule the publishers are held to — so nothing in the event says who should be credited:

The conservative default is deliberate: without it, one colony's good news would silently complete a personal quest for everybody logged in, including people nowhere near it. A custom_event left on world inside a "scope": "player" quest could never advance, so the loader drops that quest and says why in /neroquests reload-check.

Quest format carries the <modid>:<channel> convention and the table of channels that exist today across Nerotech, NeroColonies and NeroCreatures.

Server-scoped quests#

A quest with "scope": "server" keeps one shared set of counters for the whole world. Any player's action advances them, and the quest completes once, for everyone.

Counted objectives simply add up across everybody. Measured objectives behave slightly differently there: one player's snapshot may only ever raise shared progress, never lower it — otherwise the first player to spend their iron would undo what the server had collectively gathered.

Missing content (other mods not installed)#

A quest that names an item, entity or dimension this installation does not have would otherwise be uncompletable forever. Instead it degrades, controlled by the server-authoritative missingModObjectivePolicy config key:

Either way the quest stays completable, and the offending objective is logged once per server run naming only resource ids — never player data.

An objective counts as "missing content" when its item or entity id is unregistered, its tag resolves to nothing, its dimension is not loaded, its custom_event channel is namespaced to a mod that is not installed, or the quest it points at no longer exists. Note that a quest whose objectives all degrade completes as soon as it becomes available; that is the intended consequence of skip.

gate_open is the one exception — Core resolves any gate id, so an unknown gate is simply a closed gate rather than missing content.

A custom_event channel whose mod is installed but whose publisher is switched off (NeroColonies' thresholdEventsEnabled, Nerotech's pollutionEventThreshold) is not missing content. The mod is there, so the objective waits rather than degrading — which is the right answer, because an operator can turn the publisher back on.

See also#

• Quest format — the quest and chapter files these objectives live in
• Data storage — where the counters are kept, and how they are erased
• Home