Frequently Asked Questions

Q: I am noticing items are not stacking that should be, what could this be?
A: This is most likely an interaction between death-chest style mods. Witchery has a ritual that allows players to recover despawned items dropped during death. Given the obvious problems two such death-chest mods running simultaneously can cause, the ritual gets disabled if another death chest mod is detected, this is not infallible! Because of the way witchery tags items that are dropped, and clears this when they despawn or are picked up, if this process is interrupted (say by a death chest mod slurping the items and not generating itempickup events), the tag data can be left in the item in the death chest making such an item appear unique and not stackable. Dropping the item and picking it up should fix the issue. Disabling the ritual (in the config), if using other deathchest mods, is the way to go.

Q: Vampire witches are forcing constant night, can something be done?
A: Forcing constant night is normally accomplished using the Witchery Rite of Eclipse, there is a config setting I:RiteOfEclipseCooldownInSecs that can be used to set a cooldown on how often this rite can be used in a world. Once a player uses the rite in a world, all players in the same world will have to wait for the cooldown to run down before any of them may use the Rite again (does not matter where in the world the Rite is performed). The option can be set to zero for no cooldown, or up to 3600 for the maximum cooldown of once per hour.

Q: Do vampires work with the Morpheus mod?
A: No, in general a server that has vampires enabled (you can disable access to this feature), will want to ensure that both vampire players and non-vampire players have sufficient safe play time (day for normal players, night for vampires). Mods like Morpheus that allow non-vampires to force daytime without vampire players consent, can cause descent. It is recommended if enabling the vampire feature to consider the necessity for night. See the previous question for how to stop vampire witches forcing night all the time.

Q: Odd stuff is happening with potion effects, especially when mesmerizing villagers as a vampire, or null pointer exceptions when entities tick, help!
A: This is normally due to conflicts with potion ids. Minecraft only has a limited number of ids that can be used for potions and their effects (like slow, strength, night vision, etc.). This means that there can only ever be 127 potion effects added. Vanilla Minecraft already adds a fair few, and the remainder must be carefully assigned. Most mods will (in the order they are added), look for an unused id and assign their potion effect to it. Other mods will always assign to a fixed id and normally allow you to change it in their config file. Witchery will try to do both, first scanning for free ids, then adding those ids to the config file so they can be changed by hand later (or deleted to get witchery to scan again).

If you think you are running into problems, first use NEI and in the NEI screen select OPTIONS > TOOLS > DATA DUMPS > Potions: DUMP. This will then add a file to the dump folder in your .minecraft folder (where the mods folder is) called potions.txt (.minecraft/dumps/potions.txt). In this file you will see all ids and which potion effect is assigned to each (if any). Now look in the Witchery config file (normally .minecraft/config/witchery.cfg), and in the potions section you should see each potion and the id it is being assigned to, make sure the numbers all match up in both files. If one of the witchery potions is not in the NEI file, make a backup of your world then find an id in the NEI file that is free and change the incorrect id in the wichery.cfg file to it. You probably want to choose numbers between 32 and 127, to avoid any conflicts with vanilla ids. Save and restart Minecraft.

An important note, many mods say they have extended the range of valid ids to beyond 127, by and large this is not true. In actuality, there are three things than need to be changed and most mods only change one; which at best has no effect, at worst will causes crashes. To correctly extend the range (by increasing the potions array length, patching the entity NBT save format and patching the potion effect sync network message), requires the mod to become a core mod with all the side effects that entails. Most mods will not do this, and there here are only a couple of mods to my knowledge that do this correctly, but both have other caveats so install at your own risk. Witchery does not extend the potion range in a way that allows for more than 127 ids.

This problem has many symptoms that you may be experiencing with witchery, these include:
  • Flying Villagers when being mesmerized
  • Ars magica 2 or witchery spells have the wrong effects
  • Reports of Null Pointer Exceptions when the player or other mobs are being ticked
  • ...

Q: Why does my werewolf natural armor not appear to be protecting me?
A: First of all, the natural armor of a werewolf only applies if you are in wolf or wolfman form. Secondly, the armor has two parts, a damage reduction part like normal armor (which increases with werewolf level) and a max damage limit, that will significantly limit all non-silver weapon damage. It has been discovered that some Bukkit plug-ins ignore the Forge damage event system, and as a result these bonuses will get overwritten by such plug-ins. If this is an issue for you, please ask your server Admin to check which plug-ins are ignoring the Forge damage events system (often ones that provide safe areas), and ask them to ask the plug-in authors to support forge hurt and death events correctly.

Q: Why does my screen go dark, or all weird when I go into wolf form?
A: This is normally due to witchery and another mod using the same mechanism to change the users viewpoint. Witchery tries to be compatible with other mods that use methods to change viewpoint (such as Ars Magica 2 and Morph), but some other mods will change the view always, and in ways that are simply incompatible. Mods that use the Weather Mod have shown this behavior, for example. If this is happening to you, you should try to see which exact mods cause the issue and then make some hard choices. Sometimes this may be a bug that can be worked around, other times not, post your findings on the Witchery thread on Minecraft Forums, and perhaps we can help out.