Beacons and Tiers

Beacons and Tiers

Seven beacon items. Four numbered ones form the upgrade ladder; three themed ones branch off it.

The numbered ladder

Beacon	Effects at once	Level unaided	Shares unaided	Aura range	Augment slots	Fuel buffer
Portable Beacon I	1	I	—	none	0	1 200
Portable Beacon II	1	I	—	8 blocks	1	3 600
Portable Beacon III	2	I	Team	12 blocks	2	10 800
Portable Beacon IV	3	II	Team	16 blocks	4	36 000

Fuel buffers are in units; one unit is about one second of one basic effect, so Beacon I holds twenty minutes and Beacon IV holds ten hours.

Each recipe consumes the previous beacon, so upgrading never wastes what you already built.

Two columns above are ceilings you can raise. Level unaided is what the beacon reaches without help — an Amplification augment adds one more, up to whatever the effect itself allows. Shares unaided is what it can project to — an Attunement augment widens it.

Beacon I and II share nothing on their own. Beacon II still has 8 blocks of range, and that range does nothing at all until Attunement gives it someone to reach — which is exactly what its single augment slot is for.

Why the ranges are small. The vanilla beacon reaches 20 to 50 blocks. A beacon that follows you everywhere is worth far more than a fixed one at the same reach, so the beacons top out at 16 — and the block stays the better choice for a base.

The themed beacons

All three branch off Portable Beacon II, and all three sit at tier III's power level: two effect slots, two augment slots, a 10 800 buffer, and Team sharing unaided. What differs is the pool they draw from, and each pool is made of effects the vanilla beacon never offered.

Beacon	Pool	Its edge
Cinder Beacon	Fire Resistance, Strength, Haste, Resistance	The only beacon below Beacon IV that reaches level II unaided
Void Beacon	Slow Falling, Speed, Jump Boost, Night Vision	Longest reach at its power level, 14 blocks
Tidal Beacon	Water Breathing, Conduit Power, Dolphin's Grace, Night Vision	The only aquatic pool

Cinder trades a little range — 10 blocks — for that extra level. Carrying a themed beacon instead of a Beacon IV is a trade, not a downgrade: you give up a slot's worth of general power for effects no other beacon can project at all.

They needed no new mechanics. A tier entry declares which effects it accepts, so a specialist beacon is a data file plus an item — and a datapack can add more the same way.

Only one beacon works at a time

Carrying several beacons does not stack them. One beacon runs and the rest sit inert.

Letting them stack would make the whole ladder pointless — four Beacon Is would beat one Beacon IV.

The order is: a beacon worn in a Curios charm slot wins, and otherwise the first active beacon found in your inventory, hotbar first. A beacon you deliberately equipped should beat one that merely happens to be in your bag — the other way round made a worn beacon look broken, with nothing on screen to explain why.

Configuring the ladder

Every number in the tables above lives in a datapack, under data/<namespace>/portablebeacons/tier/:

Field	Column above
effect_slots	Effects at once
max_amplifier	Level unaided (0 = level I)
aura_rank	Shares unaided (0 self, 1 team, 2 allies, 3 pets)
base_range	Aura range, in blocks
augment_slots	Augment slots, 0–3
fuel_capacity	Fuel buffer, in units
effect_pool	Which effects it accepts; empty means all of them

See the Datapack Guide for the full schema and a worked example.