Difficulty

Better than Wolves has two difficulty modes, replacing the peaceful/easy/normal/hard difficulty option from vanilla Minecraft:

• Hardcore Survival: The default mode of play.
• Relaxed: A slightly less punishing experience, while still maintaining the same depth and meaningful gameplay as standard mode. Overall gameplay length for optimal play is comparable to standard mode, but it should be easier for players to get their feet under them.

The difficulty settings are stored on a per-world basis. You have the option to choose which difficulty to play on when creating a world, and while playing you can also freely switch between the two settings.

Hardcore Survival

Hardcore Survival is the default Better Than Wolves difficulty. It is named such because it blends in Normal and Hardcore difficulty into its unique, rogue-like mode.

Unlike Normal Vanilla mode, you cannot set your spawn point with a bed, and will respawn in a random place every time (see Hardcore Spawn).

Unlike Hardcore Vanilla, your world won't be deleted after a death. Since you end up respawning potentially thousands of blocks away from your home, you're basically playing in a new world already. But by not deleting your world, you get an opportunity to make it back home. And even potentially recover your items, since they will not disapper until you die again. This means that there is always a chance to recover, but with increased tension if you intend to do so in a single life to recover your items.

For new players who ends up dying a lot, this means that over time you will end up finding old bases, allowing you to recover potentially even faster.

Relaxed

Whether for new players struggling too much with the difficulty, or for returning BTW players, who knew the mod before all the early game changes and would rather focus on the tech part, the Relaxed difficulty is available to help ease a little bit the mod's difficulty, without changing its spirit.

Relaxed difficulty offers the following changes to gameplay compared to standard mode:

• Health regeneration is increased.
• Hunger costs associated with some particularly taxing actions are decreased. Actions affected are: Jumping, sprinting, swimming, using a hand crank, and starting a fire.
• Modifiers from health and hunger are less punishing.
• Hardcore Spawn maximum radius does not increase.
• Reduced radii for looted temples and abandoned villages, both to decrease the distance required to travel in order to find them, and to make it more likely to find interesting structures when respawning after a death.
• Lightning strikes do not start fires.
• Nethercoal torches do not start fires. Note that this is accomplished through a separate block id, so any torches placed in relaxed mode will never start fires, even if a world is changed to standard mode. Torches placed in standard mode will automatically convert to relaxed mode torches over time, and will not start fires while in relaxed mode.
• Pigmen do not become angry when hit by ghast fireballs.
• Jungle spiders do not attack unless provoked, and deal food poisoning for a shorter duration on hit.
• Squids do not attack players who are not in water, or who are in boats, even at night.
• Cows deal reduced damage and knockback when kicking.
• Cows do not panic if the player attempts to milk them when they aren't ready.
• Mobs drop cooked meat instead of burned meat when dying while on fire.
• Blocks are mined slightly faster when mining without the correct tool.
• Blocks can be placed while in the air.
• Animals do not startle when placing or breaking blocks.
• Animals and wolves will not die when starving, although you still need to keep them fed to get anything from them. Starving tamed wolves will also not turn hostile.
• Weeds will not kill plants, although weeds will still cause plants to stop growing when present.
• Items dropped on death are never destroyed, even on subsequent deaths.