Liber Terra Player Guide

Liber Terra fills Vintage Story's uncertain past with surviving literature from antiquity through the late medieval period — public-domain English editions, mostly from Project Gutenberg.

Epics. Chronicles. Romances. Sagas. From ancient Greece and India through medieval Europe and the Islamic golden age, if a clean public-domain English edition exists, it's fair game.

Lore dilution

Liber Terra adds many books to ruin and bony-soil loot. That makes it harder to find vanilla lore, since those pools are diluted.

The short version: vanilla ruin lore appears 0.667× as often, Better Ruins lore 0.969× as often, and existing bony-soil drops are not diluted. See Where Books Turn Up for the exact weights.

What You Get

• 92 historical works, 637 readable volumes
• Creative inventory under the Liber Terra tab — real lore books with aged/rotten covers
• One Liber Terra: Random Library Book stackrandomizer that rolls any volume and cover color
• Rare world loot from bony soil panning, vanilla ruin chests, and Better Ruins chests
• Lore books are throwable like stones (hold use); tap use still opens them to read
• Book piles on the floor — sneak + place any book into stacks of up to 17, in eight layouts

The Library

Long texts are split so a single book stays readable in the GUI — Heimskringla alone is 25 volumes, so "collect the whole set" is a real project.

Tradition	Works	Volumes	Highlights
Old English	11	86	Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Bede, Ælfric's homilies
Early Middle English	4	31	Layamon's Brut, Havelok the Dane, King Horn
Old French	8	45	The Song of Roland, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Wace
Middle High German	3	31	The Nibelungenlied, Wolfram's Parzival
Old Norse	12	77	Heimskringla, Burnt Njal, Grettir, both Eddas
Welsh	2	11	The Mabinogion, Historia Brittonum
Ancient Irish	1	11	Táin Bó Cúalnge
Iberian	1	10	Chronicle of the Cid
Medieval Latin	22	119	Boethius, Gerald of Wales, Villehardouin, Malmesbury, monastic rules
Medieval Arabic	1	2	The Awakening of the Soul
Medieval Italian	2	12	The Divine Comedy, La Vita Nuova
Classical Latin	11	91	Virgil, Lucretius, Pliny, Seneca, Caesar, Cicero
Classical Greek	12	89	Homer, Plato, Ptolemy, Aratus, Aristotle, Aesop, Sophocles
Ancient Sanskrit	2	22	Sakoontala, the Surya Siddhanta
Total	92	637

In game, /liberterra list prints the same catalog. The full work list with sources is on The Library page.

Where Books Turn Up

Source	Liber Terra chance	Existing loot retained	Weights
Bony soil panning	~1% per pan	1.000× (unchanged)	An independent drop added to every bonysoil variant; it does not compete with existing drops
Vanilla ruin lore	33.3% of lore rolls	0.667× the vanilla rate (33.3% less)	0.5 / (1.0 + 0.5) in the villager, tobias, research, diaries, and jonas pools
Better Ruins ruin lore	3.09% of newlore rolls	0.969× the existing rate (3.09% less)	8 / (251 + 8) in Better Ruins 0.6.3; only applies if that mod is installed

Every source rolls the same Liber Terra: Random Library Book randomizer, so any volume can show up in any aged or rotten cover.

Throwing Books

Tap use to read a lore book. Hold use for about a second, then release, to throw it. Thrown books always drop on impact so volumes are not destroyed.

Book Piles

Sneak + right-click a book onto the ground to start a floor pile. Add more the same way; right-click empty-handed to take from the top. Ctrl adds or takes several at once. Capacity is 17 mixed volumes per block, and every cover renders from the real book sitting there — so a pile of the Iliad looks like a pile of the Iliad.

A held stack of books piles too: each sneak + right-click lays its top book down and re-wraps whatever is still in your hands, so an armful becomes a pile without a trip through your inventory.

Any book piles, not just the ones you find: the writable book-* colours you make and sign go in alongside lore books. Scrolls, paper, letters and envelopes do not — they never lie flat, so they would stand on end in the stack.

The base game's decorative bookpile, bookstack, and bookrow clutter is converted when its chunk loads, in new structures and existing saves alike. The prop keeps its original number of books, layout family, rotation, and offset, but every visible book becomes an inventory slot holding a distinct readable volume. About one in four is vanilla research or Jonas lore; the rest are randomly chosen Liber Terra volumes.

Clutter bookshelves are a separate kind of block, with their books baked into the same model as the wood and any other shelf contents. Liber Terra converts every book-bearing full, standard, fancy, mixed-content, ruined, and lore design. It keeps the original shelf and non-book clutter, removes only the decorative book shapes, and renders actual inventory books in their exact authored positions and orientations. Leaning and irregular arrangements therefore remain leaning and irregular as books are removed; the remaining books never reflow into a generic shelf grid. Right-click takes one; Ctrl + right-click takes several. Double-sided shelves have independent books on both faces. A vanilla lore shelf keeps its specially marked discovery book and gives that first, then its remaining books are removable too. Empty, case, cobweb, alchemy, food, and reagent designs contain no modeled books and remain decorative.

Layouts

Look at a pile and press F to change how the books are arranged. With a book in hand you get the picker below; with both hands empty the same key steps to the next layout.

Layout	What it looks like
Messy	Four leaning columns with a book crowning one of them. The default.
Neat	Four tidy four-book stacks, one per quarter of the block, squared to the world axes.
Tumbled	The same skeleton as Messy with the left half knocked about.
Shelved	Books stood upright in two back-to-back rows, spines facing out. The back row fills first, so eight books read as one tidy row.
Leaning	Two tall stacks down the middle with books propped against their long faces.
Uneven	Columns of unequal height with a book slanted across them.
Bridged	Two low stacks with a pair of books bridging the gap above them.
Scattered	Spread low and wide, with one book slumped almost flat.

Five of these are traced from the clutter book piles the base game places in ruins. Messy, Uneven, Bridged, Scattered and Tumbled reproduce bookpile1 through bookpile5 at those piles' own book counts — 16, 12, 8, 7 and 17 — and are now also the layouts those props migrate into. Vanilla bookstack1 through bookstack4 become Neat piles of 16, 13, 8 and 9 books; all 15 bookrow variants become Shelved piles with the count encoded by their original shape. Leaning is ours.

Plan and elevation of each, with the books shaded light to dark in the order they fill:

Looking at a pile also lists what is in it, folding repeats together. Turn on extended debug info and it names every book against its slot and height instead.

Worlds that already had loose lore books on the floor in vanilla Quadrants ground storage keep those piles; take and break them as usual. Decorative ruin book clutter and every clutter-shelf design containing modeled books are migrated; newly placed loose books go into Liber Terra piles instead.

Other Book Mods

None of these are required. Each one is wired up only when it is actually installed, so the list below is what changes if you happen to run it alongside Liber Terra.

Mod	What Liber Terra does about it
Better Ruins	Library books turn up in its ruin chests — see Where Books Turn Up.
Bookbinders	Its books pile, carry and throw exactly like vanilla's, in their own covers. The collection moves into its Library creative tab, and found lore books burn on the same terms it gives written ones.
Book Trader	The trader stocks twelve library books: six works that are complete in a single volume, and first volumes of six long sets. It does not buy them — that mod only buys books a player wrote, and library books are found, not made.

Book Trader is behind on versions

Book Trader's latest release targets 1.19.x and is reported not to load on 1.22. The wiring above is shipped and inert until the mod catches up; it costs nothing in the meantime.

Bookbinders' books count as books everywhere Liber Terra asks the question, because it builds on the same book-* naming vanilla uses. Any other mod that does the same gets the same treatment without being named.

Install

1. Grab the latest LiberTerra-*.zip from Releases.
2. Drop the zip in your Vintage Story Mods folder, or extract it to Mods/LiberTerra.
3. Launch the game and enable Liber Terra in the mod manager.