Spontaneous remarks

The Great Sage does not only speak when you acquire a skill or ask him something: he watches you play, and drops a remark when he has something useful to say. Ore hidden behind the block you just broke, lava three blocks away, a creature behind you, a tool about to break, a better pickaxe sleeping in your bag… Thirty remarks, each with its Japanese line, its subtitle and its own limits, so that he stays a companion and never turns into a parrot.

What it looks like

A small Sage slides in from the bottom right corner of the screen, with a bubble carrying the subtitle, and speaks the remark out loud, opened by his 告 Koku marker. The bubble stays for the length of the line plus 2.6 seconds, then he leaves.

• The remark is not drawn during Assess Mode or during a ceremony scene.
• It never talks over anyone: if the Sage is already speaking, or if you are in the middle of a voice exchange with him (and for 4 seconds after), the remark is lost, not postponed: it described a moment that will be gone.
• The panic key (Delete) clears it at once.

Two safeguards

1. A general silence between any two remarks, whatever they are: tipQuietTicks, 600 ticks (30 seconds) by default. Nothing gets through before that, not even danger.
2. Per remark, its own cooldown and, often, a cap: "it is dark here" is worth hearing the first few times, not the fiftieth. Life-threatening warnings have no cap: you never get tired of being told you are on fire.

The counters (cooldowns and caps) are kept per connection: they start over when you reconnect.

Every second, the Sage goes through the conditions in order of priority, and only one remark can come out at a time: your survival first, then the terrain, then your gear, then your progress, and finally the mood.

The thirty remarks

Cooldown = minimum rest before the same remark can come back; cap = maximum number of times per connection ("—": no limit).

Danger

Mining and terrain

Gear

Progress

You, and the mood

Even without a cooldown of their own, death and respawn still obey the 30-second general silence.

Who hears them

• You must carry the Great Sage skill (or a Raphael), always, whatever the needGreatSage rule says: without it, there is nobody to watch. Only skill announcements and ceremonies work without the Sage. See Gamerules.
• Two switches, and both must agree: the server's (enableTips in greatsage-common.toml) and yours (enableTips in greatsage-client.toml, also on the Settings page as "Spontaneous remarks"). If the server turns them off you will not hear them; if you turn them off, the server cannot do anything about it.
• With the animation turned off (enableOverlay, "On screen animation"), the small Sage and his bubble are not drawn, but the voice still plays.

Settings

See Configuration.