i've been looking to commission a mod based on version beta 1.7.3, and this seemed like a good place to ask. i have a budget of a couple hundred dollars over my next few paychecks, though if what i've laid out here is too ambitious, i can scale it back or scrounge up a bigger budget. if you know of any modmakers good at modding minecraft beta, please send them here!
Design goals
selectively add back in a few specific additions from newer versions, with stricter balancing - no elytra, shulker boxes, fortune, mending etc that break the game & make existing systems or items obsolete
add no new blocks, mobs or items that aren't already in an existing version of minecraft. this is a rebalancing, designed to refine the game through subtraction instead of addition - the idea is to take only the best ideas from newer versions.
reduce bloat. add only a small amount of new blocks, mobs & items, use existing items for crafting materials instead of adding new items or mobs that solely exist for one or two items. e.g remove rabbits/phantoms & use feather for leaping/slowfall potions; remove copper/amethyst & have spyglass be made with gold/glass; that sort of thing
apply principles of risk & reward which vanilla minecraft is largely uninterested in. how useful an item is should correlate more with the difficulty required to obtain it - digging through safe, solid rock should much less lucrative than exploring dangerous caves, loot from rare & dangerous structures should feel valuable and unique, items like tipped arrows or potions should be useful enough to justify the effort required to obtain them, and mechanics which upset this balance should be reworked.
b1.7.3: i wanted to start with this version since it's the last one before hunger, the end, & villages were added to the game, all things i wanted to avoid. b1.7.3's balance is overall really good, especially with regard to food & healing, and i wanted to keep that spirit in the game.
building block additions brought in from future versions
stone bricks (& mossy/cracked/stair/slab variants)
iron bars
nether bricks (& stair/fence variants)
redstone lamps
vines
spruce wood planks (& spruce door & stair/slab variants; birch logs still make regular wood planks as in b1.7.3)
item frames, flower pots & armor stands
redstone & coal blocks
slime blocks
grass paths made by right-clicking with a shovel
candles (now made with sliemballs & string, as there's no honeycomb)
ender chests (now crafted with an ender pearl as ender eyes no longer exist)
hay bale (no stacking, for balance reasons)
lodestone (probably found as loot in dungeons or mineshafts)
scaffolding (now crafted with sticks instead of bamboo)
enchanting table, anvil & cauldron used in enchanting & brewing
this set + those already in beta 1.7.3 i think covers enough to give the player a nice variety of building options without bloating the game to the point of analysis paralysis every time you want to make a build.
items & mobs
these are being combined into one section because they're very closely tied, with certain mobs dropping items essential to other subsystems.
mobs & drops added from newer versions
endermen & ender pearls (now the ingredient for night vision potions & ender chests; eyes of ender are gone)
cave spiders (now the only source of spider eyes; spiders spawning low enough underground have a chance to be cave spiders)
blazes (now drop 1-3 blaze powder directly; brewing stands don't exist, as brewing uses a cauldron. considering the difficulty of exploring the nether in beta maybe these should rarely spawn outside fortresses?)
magma cubes & magma cream
horses (no horse armor; riding speed is a bit faster than walking speed, notable as there is no sprinting. can be healed with wheat or apples & heals naturally at a rate of half a heart per day)
donkeys (basically horses with less health & only as fast as a player walking; can be given a chest for a 3x3 grid of 9 item slots)
that scary skeleton horse thing that spawns during thunderstorms. that thing is metal. it works like a regular horse but can ride underwater (like in vanilla) & can't be healed
husks & strays (this might be a weird choice but i like the idea of slightly more dangerous mobs in desert & tundra, as in beta they're the only biomes that break the normal grass-and-trees aesthetic besides oceans. husks inflict weakness because hunger is gone)
drowned (spawns rarely underwater & often in shipwrecks; hits pull the player down under the water slightly. much scarier here bc there is no swimming mechanic)
other new items
potions
ghasts now drop ghast tears
fire charges are added as a way to ensure a player trapped in the nether can relight their portal. made from gunpowder, blaze powder & magma cream
apples are added & drop from trees as normal
gold apples can be crafted with 8 gold ingots like in current minecraft
book & quill/written book
enchanted books
leads
name tags
tipped arrows (now made with regular potions) & spectral arrows
spyglass (now made with gold & glass)
bundles (i know these still aren't in vanilla yet but they got showed off 3 or 4 years ago and i like them. right-clicking with a bundle now just opens a bundle menu where you can manually remove items instead of dropping all the contents onto the floor. these cannot be crafted, but are found in various structures as loot)
music discs (includes all the ones you can get from creepers; pigstep & otherside are also brought over but only found in strongholds & nether fortresses respectively)
other changes
zombies now have no regular item drop. versions of the game have had them drop feathers (in beta) and rotten flesh (in alpha) but i prefer feathers to be limited to chickens, and rotten flesh i don't think needs to exist - it's mostly clutter & requiring porkchop to quickly heal wolves meshes with the game's existing balance better. because they have no useful drop, zombies now drop significant XP.
armor has a set amount of defense instead of being durability-dependent, like in current minecraft.
because ores are now harder to come by, rails now provide 24 instead of 16 rails when crafted, and powered rails now provide 8 instead of 6.
gold tools are buffed. gold weapons/armor now provide more damage & defense than diamond (though are now a little even more fragile). golden tools have a little more durability then they used to. gold pickaxes can mine obsidian. and gold equipment gains double the benefit from all enchantments.
all hoes except iron are removed, the iron one is just named 'hoe'. it's extremely redundant having so many.
bows have limited durability, as in future versions of minecraft.
enchanting, enchanted books & anvils
enchanting when it was added in 1.0 was limited, expensive and optional - my goal is to keep it that way, while bringing in the game's current wide variety of enchantments & making the process more intuitive and consistently useful.
enchanting an item gives you 3 options:
gain 1 tier of an enchantment
gain 2 tiers of enchantment (requires 5 bookshelves, 2x as expensive)
gain 3 tiers of enchantment (requires 10 bookshelves, 3x as expensive)
how tiers work: something like Looting I is 1 tier, while Looting II is 2 tiers. some rare & potent enchantments are worth multiple tiers even at base level; Fortune I is worth 2 tiers, etc. one thing i want to fix is current minecraft occasionally just giving you randomly better or worse enchants - the same 30-level instance of enchanting might give you Efficiency II, or it might give you both Efficiency IV and Unbreaking I, a strictly better result. this is cut - you always get a consistently decent result, even if the exact enchantment is random.
the low cap of 3 tiers total also means enchanted gear is strong, but never so much stronger than normal gear that regular mobs become a non-issue like in current minecraft. there is also no mending & no combining enchantments, so your enchanted gear will break eventually.
List of enchantments
(All) Unbreaking - Tier I (unchanged, but now caps at tier 1)
(Sword) Fire aspect - Tier I to III (unchanged, additional tiers increase how long fire lasts)
(Sword) Knockback - Tier I to II (unchanged)
(Sword) Looting - Tier I to II (unchanged, though now has a lower cap)
(Sword) Sweeping Edge - Tier I to III (grants you the sweep attack from modern minecraft, dealing 1 heart per tier, though you can't get a tier that would deal more sweep damage than the weapon's base damage)
(Sword, new) Parry - Tier I to III (grants you the block ability from the adventure update, blocking half a heart of damage per tier)
(Tool) Efficiency - Tier I to III (unchanged)
(Tool) Fortune - Tier I is worth 2 tiers, tier II is worth 3 tiers (very nerfed & now grants a 10% chance for an extra item per tier, using up 1% of the pick's durability per extra item. does auto-smelt gold & iron now tho)
(Tool) Silk touch - worth 2 tiers (unchanged)
(Tool) Aqua affinity - worth 1 tier (now a tool enchantment instead of a helmet enchantment, but otherwise unchanged)
(Bow) Punch - Tier I to II (unchanged)
(Bow) Flame - Tier I to II (unchanged, additional tiers increase how long fire lasts)
(Bow) Infinity - Tier I to III (nerfed, now grants a 15% chance per tier to not consume arrows)
(Bow) Multishot - worth 2 tiers (now a bow enchantment instead of a crossbow enchantment, but otherwise unchanged)
(Bow) Piercing - Tier I to II (now a bow enchantment instead of a crossbow enchantment, but otherwise unchanged)
(Bow, new) Eagle eye - Tier I to III (increases bow range by 4 blocks per tier)
(Armor) Blast protection - Tier I to III (unchanged)
(Armor) Fire protection - Tier I to III (unchanged)
(Armor) Projectile protection - Tier I to III (unchanged)
(Helmet) Respiration - Tier I to III (unchanged)
(Chestplate) Thorns - Tier I to III (consumes less durability when triggered than in modern minecraft)
(Leggings) Swift sneak - Tier I to II (maxes out at speed equal to normal walk speed)
(Boots) Feather fall - Tier I to III (unchanged)
(Boots) Depth strider - Tier I to II (maxes out at speed equal to normal walk speed)
(Boots) Frost walker - worth 2 tiers (unchanged)
enchantments that provide a flat boost to all damage or defense were notably cut. i think they end up being kind of the best enchantment by default, and i think enchantments are more interesting/balanced when they grant new abilities rather than simple numerical bonuses (though efficiency is kept because fast mining isn't really a balance issue in the way high damage and defense are). mending was also cut, and unbreaking maxes out at 1 tier (so at most, essentially doubling a tool's durability).
Enchanting costs
different tools cost different amounts to enchant, since a more durable tool gets more from being enchanted than a more fragile one.
wood: cost 6 XP levels per tier
stone: costs 8 XP levels per tier
iron: costs 10 XP levels per tier
gold: costs 10 XP levels per tier, but gains twice the amount of enchantment (capped at 6 tiers total)
diamond: costs 12 levels per tier
all enchantments also cost 1 lapis per tier, like in modern minecraft.
Anvil & enchanted books
enchanted books are found as loot & can contain up to 4 tiers of enchantment (1 higher than the normal cap of 3 tiers). they may be applied to an item through an anvil, but only to unenchanted items - not already-enchanted items or other enchanted books. no combining! this means aside from rare 4-tier books, they can't push a weapon's enchantments past the normal cap of an enchanting table. applying an enchanted book to an item costs the same as in an enchantment table, minus 2 levels per tier (& costs no lapis).
anvils also have these functions, which cost no XP:
rename items
repair items. repairing removes enchantments but the player receives XP equal to half the amount those enchantments were worth, basically having the anvil fill the role of the grindstone. this means enchanted items can't be kept around forever, which is intended - using up then replacing gear is part of the game & should never be made obsolete.
anvils also no longer have durability or break, seeing as iron is harder to come by than in modern minecraft
brewing
brewing currently has a few issues that keep many players away from really engaging with it:
requires an esoteric process with numerous steps in a specific order. mixing up the order ruins the potion.
provides too many potions, but each potion takes up too much space in the inventory to be appealing for most people.
the new brewing process is:
place blaze powder + an ingredient into a water-filled cauldron, in either order
the ingredient makes the water change color; the powder makes it boil and sizzle
once both are together, the water's color turns vibrant & opaque, rippling out and making that satisfying fizzling noise to indicate the potion is complete. it can then be collected.
optionally, place redstone or glowstone in at any point to make the water crackle electrically (redstone) or glow & hum (glowstone). this has the usual effect, extending or empowering the potion (mutually exclusive with each other). gunpowder also works like normal. it makes the water hiss and bubble when added.
this process makes one bottle of potion, but each bottle contains two doses (and can be used twice before the potion is fully consumed). this means potion batches are smaller than in vanilla, but you can effectively carry two in a single inventory slot, hopefully encouraging players to engage with brewing more. drinking a potion is also instant, the way food is in beta.
List of Potions
Regeneration (made with ghast tear, unchanged)
Swiftness (made with sugar, unchanged - though notably more useful in beta where you can't sprint)
Fire resistance (made with magma cream, unchanged)
Strength (made with a second blaze powder, unchanged)
Leaping (made with a feather & is combined with the slow-fall potion, preventing fall damage - these potions are super underutilized in modern minecraft & i think combining them into one makes them more appealing. jump boost now also increases jump height by 1 block per level, instead of half a block per level)
Night vision (made with an enderpearl)
Water breathing (made with lapis lazuli)
Poison (made with a spider eye, unchanged - though spider eyes, notably, are now only dropped by cave spiders)
Slowness (made with a slimeball)
Weakness (made with a red or brown mushroom)
healing & harming are cut completely - instant healing is how food already works in beta anyway, so it's not really necessary.
tipped arrows are also now made with regular potions instead of requiring an endgame material, so hopefully players will actually use them. i don't think i've ever seen anyone bother with them in vanilla minecraft. potions & tipped arrows will probably also be found as loot in various structures.
when firing a bow, it defaults to standard arrows. if the player has any tipped arrows in their inventory, they can hold the right mouse button instead of clicking it to switch their hotbar with a row of each arrow type in their inventory - they can then use the scroll wheel to select an arrow type before releasing the mouse button to fire. this helps to avoid wasting tipped arrows.
caves & structures
similar to the caves & cliffs update, the underground is expanded: the world now goes down to y-level -32. stone begins changing into deepslate around y-level 12. spider spawns starting at y-level 12 have a 1% chance per layer below that to be cave spiders instead; this is to make the deepest layers of the underground more deadly in a sort of obvious way than the upper layers.
caves look mostly the same as in beta 1.7.3, though with more variety in cave width, leading to occasional larger, more open/spacious caverns. caves are more common, since digging through solid rock without finding any caves is often dull.
ore spawns mostly only in caves - this means branch mining is mostly ineffective except for seeking out more caves. it also spawns lower down to accommodate the deeper world size, especially iron which is about 50% more common on top of spawning lower down. like caves & cliffs, coal spawns less often the deeper underground you are, making it very possible to run out of light if the player is unprepared.
structures
one thing i wanna overhaul somewhat is what loot you find in which structures. current minecraft i think doesn't know what to give you a lot of the time, and kinda just fills chests with whatever it has lying around. having less overlap between which loot is found in what structures i think gives each structure more of its own identity and makes them feel more distinct.
mineshafts are brought over basically exactly the same as they are in current minecraft. personally i kinda think they're already perfect - they're so claustrophobic with so many corners to peek around. i think with beta's healing system & no stackable food they could be really scary. signature loot: lots of rails, iron & gold, occasional redstone & lapis, iron pickaxes; chests also have stacks of stone & cobblestone. every once in a while find a saddle or bundle.
dungeons i kinda want dungeons to have a chance to be bigger - mazelike with multiple rooms where you have to track down the spawner while monsters wander around through the corridors with you. bigger dungeons would have a higher chance for multiple chests. signature loot: golden apple, name tags, saddle, bundle. there's also a bunch of filler loot that's the same as it would be in vanilla minecraft, plus TNT, potions and tipped arrows. each chest contains 1 signature loot & some filler. music discs are no longer in the loot pool because you can get them from creepers like in modern minecraft (though otherside & pigstep aren't dropped by creepers but found in rare structures).
strongholds are rare, sometimes with entrances barely visible on the surface like this image from when jeb was testing strongholds for 1.0. there is no end portal (since there's no End dimension). signature loot: the most valuable thing is the lodestone sometimes found in chests or maybe on fancy altars. chests have ender pearls, obsidian, glowstone, potions, enchanted books, iron gear, etc. the otherside music disc is found only in stronghold chests, and rarely. certain rooms have very specific loot, like the libraries having mostly enchanted books while armory rooms have lots of iron gear.
nether fortreses are roughly identical to how they usually are, but there are no blaze spawners - blazes just spawn more often. this is mostly cause i find blazes more interesting to fight on their own terms than camping at their spawners waiting to kill them as soon as they appear. they might need some nerfs to their range, especially since bows don't go as far in this version. signature loot: occasional chests with gold & stacks of nether brick, some blaze powder, and sometimes that pigstep music disc. the real loot here is blaze powder dropped by blazes, so it's alright if the chests are a bit underwhelming.
GUI, quality of life, etc.
ideally all of the UI improvements since beta should be added. being able to shift-click things into furnaces, drag-and-drop items across a crafting grid, put items instantly back in the inventory if they're in the crafting grid when you close the inventory, etc. there are mods that have done this already, such as beta unleashed - i don't know enough about modding to know if this is possible, but if possible it'd be best to use one of those improved beta mods as a basis for this one.
item info
a while back minecraft added a "recipe book" button in the inventory which showed crafting recipes. this is a generally good feature, but it often still leaves out crucial information & it can be annoying to search through the dozens of recipes to find what you need. unlocking recipes is also unclear.
instead, i want this mod to have a slot above the crafting grid labeled "item info" - you place an item in the slot to bring up tabbed menu similar to the recipe book, with each tab that applies:
if the item has any notable non-crafting use, the first tab is an item tab which uses the item as its icon. a cauldron's item tab tells you it's used for brewing and how; a tipped arrow's item tab (probably also a bow's) tells you how to fire tipped arrows; an anvil's item tab lists each of its functions.
if the item is used in any crafting recipes, the first tab is a crafting tab using the crafting table's top as its icon. items the player hasn't had in their inventory yet only appear as silhouettes in crafting recipes.
similarly, the furnace tab appears if the item can be cooked or used as fuel. its icon is the front of a lit furnace. undiscovered results are similarly grayed out.
the enchanting tab appears if the item is or can be enchanted. lapis (fuel for enchanting) also appears in this tab. its icon is the side of an enchanting table.
the brewing tab uses a potion as its icon & appears if the item is an ingredient or modifier for potion brewing.
notable quality-of-life changes
leaves' designated tool is now an ax.
most clutter is removed from the F3 screen (shift-F3 can be pressed to bring up niche technical info moved away from it). F3 now only shows biome, coordinates (need compass), and time of day (need clock). it also no longer shows nametags above mobs like b1.7.3 does.
though food can't be stacked, you can cram multiple instances of cookable food into a furnace while it cooks. taking any cooked food out of a furnace dumps all cooked food stacked in there into the player's inventory (or on the ground if that's full).
while holding Shift, you don't interact with blocks, allowing you to put signs on chests, etc. like modern minecraft
textures: i think there's a few texture packs which convert the new blocks from after the texture update to the old art style. ideally i'd use those for any new blocks re-added from future versions, with permission.
difficulty
ideally most of these changes will be optional, because i think they mostly just appeal to me. maybe in a separate "world difficulty" with the currently existing difficulty options renamed to "combat difficulty".
various aspects of caves (cave spiders, less ore, coal not spawning near the bottom) are more difficult & dangerous, especially lower down.
animals spawn much less often, no longer despawn, and make new animals by breeding, as in modern minecraft (though the spawn chance isn't nearly as low as in modern minecraft). however, they can't be bred manually - they just do it on their own occasionally, with a lower chance the more animals there already are nearby. this means compact farms have diminishing returns, encouraging players to either make do with small amounts of resources or invest heavily into large farms if they want more. nearby hay bales slightly increase the chance of breeding/spawning, allowing for more productive farms.
similarly, crops grow slower once the number of crops surrounding them exceeds a certain point. wheat crops also drop fewer seeds.
mobs spawned from monster spawners drop no XP or loot, making them useless for automation.
beds no longer skip nighttime. they only set your spawn point.
similar to modern minecraft, the range at which light sources prevent monster spawns is expanded - hostile mobs only spawn around light level 3. however, coal veins are only about half as big, and like in the caves & cliffs update, spawn less frequently the deeper underground you go, no longer spawning at all below layer y-16.
coordinates & time of day are no longer visible in the f3 screen unless holding a compass or clock respectively.
i'm not sure how many other people are super interested in the more grounded, survival-y aspects of minecraft but it's my favorite part of the game. when i look up mods to increase the difficulty, most of what i get just makes monsters deal more damage instead of putting pressure on the player's resources; the closest thing to a survival experience is mods that add thirst meters or temperature. but i don't really want those things - i just want the game to lean into the resource management and exploration it's already good at. modern versions of the game have slowly pulled it away from those things, and while i enjoy playing beta to get that experience, i love how modern minecraft uses structures, loot & extra systems like brewing/enchanting to motivate the player to explore. every version feels like it has unfulfilled potential.
there was a brief period while caves & cliffs was being developed where mojang drastically lowered the available iron in the world and made it spawn lower down. it ended up being some of the most fun i've had in minecraft - when iron is rare, you have to make meaningful decisions about what to spend it on; the choice between a bucket, a new weapon or pickaxe, or more armor feels much more engaging than having all the iron you'll ever need within an hour of play. that's exactly the kind of thing i want more of and i wanted to give every part of the game that feeling.
this is probably going to end up being a very niche mod, but i think it fills a role i haven't found any really good mods for yet.
i've been looking to commission a mod based on version beta 1.7.3, and this seemed like a good place to ask. i have a budget of a couple hundred dollars over my next few paychecks, though if what i've laid out here is too ambitious, i can scale it back or scrounge up a bigger budget. if you know of any modmakers good at modding minecraft beta, please send them here!
Design goals
b1.7.3: i wanted to start with this version since it's the last one before hunger, the end, & villages were added to the game, all things i wanted to avoid. b1.7.3's balance is overall really good, especially with regard to food & healing, and i wanted to keep that spirit in the game.
building block additions brought in from future versions
this set + those already in beta 1.7.3 i think covers enough to give the player a nice variety of building options without bloating the game to the point of analysis paralysis every time you want to make a build.
items & mobs
these are being combined into one section because they're very closely tied, with certain mobs dropping items essential to other subsystems.
mobs & drops added from newer versions
other new items
other changes
enchanting, enchanted books & anvils
enchanting when it was added in 1.0 was limited, expensive and optional - my goal is to keep it that way, while bringing in the game's current wide variety of enchantments & making the process more intuitive and consistently useful.
enchanting an item gives you 3 options:
how tiers work: something like Looting I is 1 tier, while Looting II is 2 tiers. some rare & potent enchantments are worth multiple tiers even at base level; Fortune I is worth 2 tiers, etc. one thing i want to fix is current minecraft occasionally just giving you randomly better or worse enchants - the same 30-level instance of enchanting might give you Efficiency II, or it might give you both Efficiency IV and Unbreaking I, a strictly better result. this is cut - you always get a consistently decent result, even if the exact enchantment is random.
the low cap of 3 tiers total also means enchanted gear is strong, but never so much stronger than normal gear that regular mobs become a non-issue like in current minecraft. there is also no mending & no combining enchantments, so your enchanted gear will break eventually.
List of enchantments
enchantments that provide a flat boost to all damage or defense were notably cut. i think they end up being kind of the best enchantment by default, and i think enchantments are more interesting/balanced when they grant new abilities rather than simple numerical bonuses (though efficiency is kept because fast mining isn't really a balance issue in the way high damage and defense are). mending was also cut, and unbreaking maxes out at 1 tier (so at most, essentially doubling a tool's durability).
Enchanting costs
different tools cost different amounts to enchant, since a more durable tool gets more from being enchanted than a more fragile one.
all enchantments also cost 1 lapis per tier, like in modern minecraft.
Anvil & enchanted books
enchanted books are found as loot & can contain up to 4 tiers of enchantment (1 higher than the normal cap of 3 tiers). they may be applied to an item through an anvil, but only to unenchanted items - not already-enchanted items or other enchanted books. no combining! this means aside from rare 4-tier books, they can't push a weapon's enchantments past the normal cap of an enchanting table. applying an enchanted book to an item costs the same as in an enchantment table, minus 2 levels per tier (& costs no lapis).
anvils also have these functions, which cost no XP:
brewing
brewing currently has a few issues that keep many players away from really engaging with it:
the new brewing process is:
this process makes one bottle of potion, but each bottle contains two doses (and can be used twice before the potion is fully consumed). this means potion batches are smaller than in vanilla, but you can effectively carry two in a single inventory slot, hopefully encouraging players to engage with brewing more. drinking a potion is also instant, the way food is in beta.
List of Potions
healing & harming are cut completely - instant healing is how food already works in beta anyway, so it's not really necessary.
tipped arrows are also now made with regular potions instead of requiring an endgame material, so hopefully players will actually use them. i don't think i've ever seen anyone bother with them in vanilla minecraft. potions & tipped arrows will probably also be found as loot in various structures.
when firing a bow, it defaults to standard arrows. if the player has any tipped arrows in their inventory, they can hold the right mouse button instead of clicking it to switch their hotbar with a row of each arrow type in their inventory - they can then use the scroll wheel to select an arrow type before releasing the mouse button to fire. this helps to avoid wasting tipped arrows.
caves & structures
similar to the caves & cliffs update, the underground is expanded: the world now goes down to y-level -32. stone begins changing into deepslate around y-level 12. spider spawns starting at y-level 12 have a 1% chance per layer below that to be cave spiders instead; this is to make the deepest layers of the underground more deadly in a sort of obvious way than the upper layers.
caves look mostly the same as in beta 1.7.3, though with more variety in cave width, leading to occasional larger, more open/spacious caverns. caves are more common, since digging through solid rock without finding any caves is often dull.
ore spawns mostly only in caves - this means branch mining is mostly ineffective except for seeking out more caves. it also spawns lower down to accommodate the deeper world size, especially iron which is about 50% more common on top of spawning lower down. like caves & cliffs, coal spawns less often the deeper underground you are, making it very possible to run out of light if the player is unprepared.
structures
one thing i wanna overhaul somewhat is what loot you find in which structures. current minecraft i think doesn't know what to give you a lot of the time, and kinda just fills chests with whatever it has lying around. having less overlap between which loot is found in what structures i think gives each structure more of its own identity and makes them feel more distinct.
GUI, quality of life, etc.
ideally all of the UI improvements since beta should be added. being able to shift-click things into furnaces, drag-and-drop items across a crafting grid, put items instantly back in the inventory if they're in the crafting grid when you close the inventory, etc. there are mods that have done this already, such as beta unleashed - i don't know enough about modding to know if this is possible, but if possible it'd be best to use one of those improved beta mods as a basis for this one.
item info
a while back minecraft added a "recipe book" button in the inventory which showed crafting recipes. this is a generally good feature, but it often still leaves out crucial information & it can be annoying to search through the dozens of recipes to find what you need. unlocking recipes is also unclear.
instead, i want this mod to have a slot above the crafting grid labeled "item info" - you place an item in the slot to bring up tabbed menu similar to the recipe book, with each tab that applies:
notable quality-of-life changes
textures: i think there's a few texture packs which convert the new blocks from after the texture update to the old art style. ideally i'd use those for any new blocks re-added from future versions, with permission.
difficulty
ideally most of these changes will be optional, because i think they mostly just appeal to me. maybe in a separate "world difficulty" with the currently existing difficulty options renamed to "combat difficulty".
i'm not sure how many other people are super interested in the more grounded, survival-y aspects of minecraft but it's my favorite part of the game. when i look up mods to increase the difficulty, most of what i get just makes monsters deal more damage instead of putting pressure on the player's resources; the closest thing to a survival experience is mods that add thirst meters or temperature. but i don't really want those things - i just want the game to lean into the resource management and exploration it's already good at. modern versions of the game have slowly pulled it away from those things, and while i enjoy playing beta to get that experience, i love how modern minecraft uses structures, loot & extra systems like brewing/enchanting to motivate the player to explore. every version feels like it has unfulfilled potential.
there was a brief period while caves & cliffs was being developed where mojang drastically lowered the available iron in the world and made it spawn lower down. it ended up being some of the most fun i've had in minecraft - when iron is rare, you have to make meaningful decisions about what to spend it on; the choice between a bucket, a new weapon or pickaxe, or more armor feels much more engaging than having all the iron you'll ever need within an hour of play. that's exactly the kind of thing i want more of and i wanted to give every part of the game that feeling.
this is probably going to end up being a very niche mod, but i think it fills a role i haven't found any really good mods for yet.
Have you found anyone yet? I'd be willing to give it a shot if you're still interested. It may take a little bit of time, though.
Hello
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