Relics Guide: Mantles and Defensive Relics
Several of the most useful relics are defensive mantles and charms that keep you alive. This guide covers what each one does, based on its in-game ability description.
Mantles
Ghostly Mantle — leaves mist behind you while moving; targets in the mist lose air, and looking at you builds charges that reduce their effectiveness. It can also cancel lethal damage, sending you into spectral flight with a period of immortality.
Leafy Mantle — lets you move freely through tree leaves and prevents fall damage when you land on them, healing you while inside foliage; on fatal damage it protects you from death by absorbing nearby leaves.
Midnight Mantle — grants damage and attack-speed bonuses whose strength tracks the Moon phase, with health and regeneration bonuses at other phases, and cloaks you in invisibility in low light.
Glitchy Mantle — gives incoming attacks a chance to miss entirely and periodically leaves a glitchy copy of you that disrupts nearby targets on contact.
Defensive charms
Jellyfish Necklace — raises maximum health and regeneration while you are in liquid or rain, and accumulates electric-arc charges that discharge into things you touch.
Reflective Necklace — on taking damage, has a chance to store some of it in an orb and reflect it back when you next attack.
Shield of Retaliation — holding to guard opens a parry window that blocks damage from sources in front of you.
Because relic stats are randomized and level up, the exact values differ per copy — research and upgrade each mantle to see its full numbers in game.
These cannot be crafted
The mod has no crafting path for relics themselves. Its complete recipe list on 1.21.1 is five entries — two crafting, one smelting, one smoking, one campfire — and on 1.20.1 it has none at all.
Every mantle and defensive relic therefore comes from exploration and loot. There is no alternative route, no upgrade recipe, and nothing to build.
Planning around that
Because relics are found rather than made, the sensible approach is breadth: clear a wide variety of structures rather than farming one repeatedly. The mod is only 25 items in total, so each new find is a meaningful fraction of the whole set.
Losing one matters
With no way to re-craft a relic, losing one is permanent unless you find another. That makes storage and death-recovery planning more important in this mod than in most — a relic in a chest at base is worth more than one carried into a risky fight.
Version note
The 1.21.1 build (0.12.8) adds a handful of craftable extras that 1.20.1 (0.8.0.13) does not have, but the relic acquisition model is identical on both.