Iron's Spells: Incantation

No voice-chat mod required

Incantation now captures your microphone itself. Simple Voice Chat is no longer a dependency — the mod opens the mic through OpenAL, which Minecraft already ships. Voice casting works on its own, and still works alongside SVC if you use one to talk to friends.

This changes your setup. Read the next section before updating.

The microphone is gated now

By default the mic is only open while you're holding a spellbook, staff or imbued weapon — in either hand, or in your Curios slot. Stow it and the mic closes. No keybind involved.

Set gatingMode in config/voicespells-client.toml if you want something else:

Mode	Microphone is open
HOLD_ITEM	while a spell focus is in your hands or Curios slot (default)
HOLD_KEY_AND_ITEM	while holding the cast key and a spell focus
HOLD_KEY	while holding the cast key
ALWAYS_ON	whenever you're in a world — fully hands-free

If you talk to friends over voice chat while armed, use HOLD_KEY_AND_ITEM. Carrying a spellbook isn't on its own evidence you meant to cast, and with a book parked in Curios, HOLD_ITEM is close to always-on in practice.

The HUD mic dot shows which state you're in: dim means closed, lit means open, and it pulses while it's hearing you.

Now on Minecraft 1.20.1

Alongside 1.21.1. Forge 47.x for 1.20.1, NeoForge 21.1.x for 1.21.1 — one codebase.

Also new

• The speech model installs itself on first launch (~40 MB). Spanish, Russian, French and German models are one modelId line away.
• Spell names the model can't pronounce are respelled automatically. Vosk only hears words in its lexicon, so a spell whose name is missing was silently uncastable. Names that can't be rescued are now named in the log instead of failing quietly.
• Custom phrases no longer need a restart — use More… → Reload grammar now.
• /voicespells devices lists every capture device and which one is selected.

Fixed

• Clients without Simple Voice Chat crashed on startup. SVC was declared optional, but the mod touched a class that couldn't load without it, so mod loading died with NoClassDefFoundError instead of idling. This affected 0.9.5 and earlier — it's why 0.9.5 should not be used.
• The microphone opened briefly on the title screen, contradicting the setting that says it doesn't.
• Documentation that described features the code doesn't have: there is no macro recorder, combat-only never counted damage you dealt, ANY_SPELLBOOK also accepts hotbar slots, and there is no "Light" palette.