The Aether II

☁️ The Iconic Dimension Mod Returns! ☁️

Step into a renewed and expanded Aether Dimension with The Aether II! The sequel to the quintessential dimension mod. Begin your journey with a Glowstone Portal and Water, and ascend to The Aether's Holy Isles for a new and exciting adventure!

The Aether II adds an entirely new dimension to the game based on the original Aether Mod made by our team back in 2011, and works as a sequel to the recent remaster of The Aether Mod. This new take on the classic dimension revamps the concept with brand-new biomes, mobs, progression systems, structures, and much, much more!

Welcome to the historic Holy Isles, the ancestral home of The Aether's Valkyries. This part of The Aether's world consists of beautiful landscapes, high winds, vast oceans of cloud, and deep, mysterious caves. Explore these islands and uncover the secrets of the forgotten ruins and drive evil from the hearts of its many dungeons.

The Aether's world has its own set of native materials like Skyroot, Holystone, Zanite, and Gravitite. Craft new equipment with supernatural abilities, farm new fantasy animals, and establish epic builds across the dimension's breathtaking world! The Aether II is a chance to start fresh and enjoy a new survival adventure exploration experience.

Gameplay in the Holy Isles is centred around survival adventure, with vanilla-esque survival progression featuring new ores, new utility blocks, a large suite of blocks to build with, structures to explore and loot, and many new mythical mobs. But it doesn't stop at just vanilla mechanics. The Aether II features multiple new gameplay and progression mechanics that expand and enrich the adventure.

At the heart of these new mechanics is the Traveller's Guidebook, a new, expanded player GUI. Accessing the Guidebook gives players the ability to equip new gear types to custom inventory slots, check gameplay and lore information about discoveries around the dimension, and eventually track various progression markers and plan out navigation routes through the world.

Discover new core gameplay mechanics that enhance the survival adventure experience and invest in new material progression to upgrade your equipment and stats to make yourself more powerful against the Aether's monsters and enemies.

The mod's new mechanics include:

• Equipment Abilities
• Armor Set Bonuses
• New Equipment Slots
• Weapon Damage Types
• Enhanced Status Effects
• New Utility Blocks
• Guidebook Bestiary
• Flying Mounts
• Unique Dungeon Loot

The Holy Isles are made up of four main biome themes, each of which is made up of a handful of individual biome designs.

Highfields Biomes

• Flourishing Field
  • The classic Aether landscapes of rolling floating hills, open fields, sparse trees, and plentiful fauna.
• Verdant Woods
  • Dense forests of Skyroot Trees that offer respite from the harsh sun and powerful winds of The Aether.
• Shrouded Forest
  • Skyplane forests so tightly packed together that the surface is veiled in darkness, the canopy above has become a moss covered sanctuary.
• Shimmering Basin
  • Large, open lakes and clear skies combined with low island heights make this biome a perfect point for travelling between islands and the Cloud Sea.

Magnetic Biomes

• Magnetic Scar
  • Jagged Hills and valleys made up of natural terrain and giant pillars of the magnetic metal, Ferrosite.
• Turquoise Forest
  • Skybirch trees and Ferrosite Sand protected by tall narrow pillars of Ferrosite metal.
• Glistening Swamp
  • Giant Mushrooms and Greatroot Trees surround mineral rich water deposits
• Violet Highwoods
  • Tall Wisptop Trees with dense mossy foliage on the surface, travelling across the canopy is made easy by Gliders and Aerbunnies

Arctic Biomes

• Frigid Sierra
  • Tall mountaintop islands coated in deep snow and ice, one of the most harsh environments for The Aether's ecology to adapt to
• Enduring Woodland
  • Skypine Forests protect the underlying ecosystem from the harsh snow and wind, making this a safe haven for many animals in The Aether's arctic
• Frozen Lakes
  • Wide open sheets of ice may look to be easy to traverse, but hidden fragile ice pockets give way to unsuspecting travellers
• Sheer Tundra
  • Rocky moss covered isles with frozen ground, the lack of trees give way to open landscapes

Special Biomes

We also have multiple special rarer biome types in development, currently an early version of the Irradiated Biomes are implemented. In the future these islands will have plenty of unique environmental storytelling content and loot to find. And we'll also be implementing a special Cloud Ocean biome known as The Expanse, populated by fleets of Cloud Ships, Pirates, and resource rich sunken islands.

The Aether's Holy Isles are also home to some useful and interesting structures. Currently, the suite of explorable structures is quite small, but we plan to add a large variety of buildings, ruins, monster dens, and settlements to discover and explore in future alpha builds.

Alongside a few miscellaneous structures that offer small caches of loot and environmental variety, our main utility structure at the moment is the Traveller's Outposts. These are small community hubs built around ancient Valkyrie ruins that will eventually be populated by multiple unique NPC characters, but for now mainly is used for its Outpost Campfire.

Interacting with this Campfire will activate it as an additional respawn point on top of where you last slept. While exploring The Aether's world you can stop by any Outposts you find, then if you happen to fall in battle you can choose to respawn not at your base but at your latest visited Outpost. Regularly stopping by Outposts allows you to get back in the action as quick as possible.

In the future, we'll have an Outpost NPC that runs a Moa Carriage service which will let you fast travel between Outposts or back to your home base for a small fee.

Take to the skies on your own flying mount with Moas!

Moas return in The Aether II with updated visuals and reworked mechanics. To tame your own Moa you'll need to find a Wild Egg in a Moa Nest, unfortunately the parents won't be happy with your intrusion and will defend their nest. Try to quickly steal their Egg and bring it back to your home base. Place the Wild Moa Egg on a block of Woven Skyroot Sticks, and it will eventually hatch into a Baby Moa!

Feed your Baby Moa Aechor Petals or Moa Feed when it's hungry and after three rounds of feeding it will grow into a Tamed Adult Moa! Craft a Moa Saddle and equip it to your Moa and you'll be able to take to the skies!

The current mechanics are Work in Progress but in the future Moa flight will give you fun and engaging flight and gliding mechanics that make travelling to the far reaches of The Holy Isles easy and fun!

To gain access to late game materials and utilities, you'll need to venture below the Cloud Sea of The Aether's Holy Isles into the area known as The Undercloud.

Beneath the safety net of the Cloud Sea there's nothing between you and the void below, falling down without proper protections could prove fatal. Careful traversal around these open air cave systems is key to gathering stronger resources like Arkenium, Gravitite, and Corrobonite.

The Undercloud is made up of a new stone material called Undershale, which is harder than Holystone and requires a better pickaxe to mine, so make sure to upgrade your equipment on the surface before venturing down below.

While exploring The Aether's Holy Isles you may stumble across a mysterious lost structure. The Aether is home to many perilous Dungeons filled with unique hostile mobs, rare loot, and intimidating Bosses! Test your skills and your gear by challenging any Dungeons you find on your adventure and claim powerful uncraftable items as your reward.

Currently, we have one Dungeon implemented, The Sentry Ruins, a reimagining of the original mod's Bronze Dungeon. Explore these mysterious underground facilities haunted by menacing mechanical creatures and discover the sleeping Slider, a giant block of solid rock that comes to life when disturbed to defend its resting place and precious cache of ancient relics.

Over the course of Alpha development we will be implementing numerous new Dungeons, including reimaginings of the Dungeons from the original mod as well as multiple brand-new Dungeon concepts.

The Aether II adds new materials and utilities intended to extend the late game progression without relying on randomised elements like Enchanting. Most of these centre around the Arkenium Forge utility block, which lets you linearly upgrade your crafted equipment by Reinforcing them with Arkenium. Higher level Reinforcement requires a rare ore, Corrobonite, which can only be mined with Gravitite tier pickaxes.

Fully upgraded equipment and loot items come with Charm Slots. Charms are loot items that apply specific upgrades to a piece of equipment, such as increasing damage dealt by weapons or the mining speed of tools. You can equip a Charm to a compatible slot via the Arkenium Forge to permanently apply the upgrade to the item.

The Sentry Ruins come with a small pool of lootable Charms to test out this progression system, so try to gather as many pieces of Loot Equipment and Charms to create the most powerful gear in the mod!

The Aether II is in early development, so new content and changes will be published frequently!

The following is a brief list of some of the content that we're planning to develop in the near future as we publish new alpha builds:

• Infected Guardian Tree Dungeon
• Lost Valkyrie Temple Mini-Dungeon
• Primordial Foundry Dungeon
• Sun Acolyte Hideout Mini-Dungeon
• Bandit King's Fortress Dungeon
• Environmental Atmosphere and Mechanics
• Biome Specific Environmental Mechanics
• Biome Specific Mobs
• Additional Miscellaneous Structures
• Additional Undercloud Biomes
• Undercloud Specific Mobs
• Outpost NPCs
• Settlements
• Non-Dungeon Loot items
• New Moa Mechanics
• Guidebook Status Screen
• Patreon Cosmetic Rewards

☁️ Join the Conversation ☁️

Come join our Discord server to chat with a growing community of over 10,000 members!

Have a question for the developers? Need help setting the mod up? Found a bug? We have dedicated support and development channels for the mod! Or maybe you just want to chat about the mod or organise play sessions on our official server? The Aether Discord is the place to be! Our friendly staff and welcoming community will make sure you feel at home with us!

☁️ Support The Aether Team ☁️

Without your support, making the mod wouldn’t have been possible. Please consider pledging to help fund development! Every pledge goes directly towards development and enables us to continue doing what we love most.

☁️ Contributing to the Project ☁️

Looking to contribute to the mod? The Aether II is open source, meaning anyone who is interested is able to contribute code to help out the project! More info about this can be found on our GitHub Repository.

Both our Translation and Code Contribution credits can be found on our GitHub repository.