Quires — every book in your project binds itself

Your project already has books in it. Lore entries, skill tomes, quest journals, harbour ledgers, a sealed grimoire somebody put in a chest. Right now every one of them is the same icon.

Quires binds them. It reads the name and the price your database already carries, and renders each book as a closed, bound volume — boards and covering chosen from what kind of book it is, raised spine bands counted from its length, blind- or gold-tooling composed from what it is about, clasps and bosses from its value, gilt or sprinkled edges, and wear from its station in life. Then it shelves them all in a case with a bookseller's collation card.

You do not tag anything. A Psalter of the Quiet Hours comes out in red goatskin with five raised cords and crossed keys in gold. A Harbour Ledger comes out in parchment board, slipcased, with an anchor struck blind. A Forge Manual gets limp vellum and an alembic. None of those were authored — they are what the classifier does with a name, a price and a description.

⚠️ Compatibility — the question you actually have

Tested against RPG Maker MZ with the stock scripts unmodified, verified by running the plugin in the real engine rather than only in tests.

Plugin Manager order:

1. QuiresRender.js
2. QuiresCorpus.js
3. QuiresDevices.js
4. QuiresBind.js
5. QuiresVolume.js
6. QuiresScene.js

This order reads sensibly in the list and nothing depends on it. Every file resolves its siblings the first time it needs them rather than when it loads, so Quires works in whatever order the Plugin Manager gives you. That is tested rather than hoped for: the headless suite and the in-engine verification both load the six files ALPHABETICALLY — which puts QuiresBind.js before every file it depends on — and require the same bindings out of it. QuiresScene.js is the case scene and can be switched off if you only want the renderer.

It patches no core RPG Maker method at all, so there is nothing of anyone else's for it to collide with, and nothing of the engine's for it to break.

What it can make

• 10 covering materials, each with its own real grain — a goatskin pebble, a pigskin follicle triad, a buckram weave, a velvet nap, a shagreen nodule, a laid-paper chain line
• 6 board shapes — square, bevelled, rounded, cushioned, yapp, flush-cut
• 6 spine treatments — raised cords, smooth hollow, laced-in, exposed Coptic sewing, lapped, slipcased
• 19 tooled devices, struck in gold leaf or blind
• 8 pieces of furniture — clasps, straps, corner bosses, a centrepiece, a chain staple, edge clips, ties
• 5 edge treatments — plain, sprinkled, gilt, gauffered, stained

10 × 6 × 6 is 360 base volumes before the tooling, the furniture, the edges and the wear.

There is no PNG in this plugin

Not one. No atlas, no sprite sheet, no image file of any kind. Every leather grain, every raised band, every gold-tooled device and every clasp is drawn from paths at whatever size it is asked for — the same code draws a 90px book on the shelf and a 420px book on the card.

That is also why the gold reads on black goatskin and on pale vellum: the ink is solved against the covering it is struck on rather than fixed, so it cannot come out as one flat rectangle of tone.

It is not a reader

Quires never opens a book. The object is the closed volume — what it looks like on a shelf, in a shop window, on a reward screen, in a collection.

If you want your players to read the text inside, use a reader plugin; several good free ones exist and this does not compete with them. Point your reader at the same entry and you have both halves.

Save-safe by construction

Quires writes nothing into your save file. Every binding is derived from the database entry each time it is needed, so a save made with Quires loads correctly without it, there is no migration to get wrong when you update, and renaming an item re-binds it immediately with no stale cache. Verified in the engine: opening the case does not change the save contents at all.

Deterministic

The same database binds the same books forever. Nothing calls Math.random; every binding comes from a hash of the entry's own name, so a book keeps its binding when you insert an item above it, and a screenshot you take today reproduces tomorrow.

What it reads

Every entry in Items, Armors and Weapons whose name says it is a book — both English shapes, so Field Journal and Psalter of the Quiet Hours both qualify while Tome Cutter stays a blade. Override either way with <quires>, <quires: none>, <quires: covering=goat> or <quires: motif=anchor>.

More from Core Systems Asset Factory

• Sigil Core — every spell draws its own seal
• Facet — every gem is cut and lit
• Barrow — every grave marks itself
• Glaze — every vessel is thrown and fired
• Armorial — every house gets its arms