Hardcore Modes

Hardcore Modes are alterations to core game mechanics which make the game more realistic and challenging. Some modes are optional, while other such alterations are fundamental parts of Better Than Wolves.

• [Optional] - this mode can be turned off or on in config file
• [Default] - Despite being optional this mode is the default setting and is recommended for a proper and balanced Better than Wolves experience.

Hardcore Armor

A huge re-balance of the armor system, adding in different advantages and disadvantages of all types of armor. For one thing, armor now carries weight that slows the player depending on material. This, in conjunction with hardcore ores makes some armor, such as iron, difficult to wear and obtain, but more protective.

Hardcore Baking

Cookies, Cakes, and Pumpkin Pies have their corresponding unbaked version - cookie dough, cake batter, and oven ready pumpkin pie. The recipes for these unbaked items are the same as the vanilla versions except that cookie batter is made with chocolate instead of cocoa beans and all the recipes are now shapeless. These uncooked items must then be placed into a furnace or on a kiln to be baked into their respective items. Flour can also be baked into bread in a kiln or in a furnace.

Hardcore Beacons

This completely revamps the way vanilla beacons work to make them more difficult to construct, more powerful (as in... not useless), and way more interesting overall.

Hardcore Bedding

This effectively disables beds as a means to set spawn position and to skip the night. This was done to encourage construction (especially of rail networks), restore the balance between day and night activities within the game, restore the impact of weather on gameplay, and to give player death more consequence.

"Beds are just a bad feature, mkay?" - FC

Hardcore Bonemeal

A Modification to the way that Bonemeal works. Bonemeal now can only fertilize soil and not instantly grow plants. It can also not grow saplings, but can grow tall grass and flowers on grass.

Hardcore Bouncing

This prevents blocks from being placed while the player is in the air by jumping, in order to reduce the effectiveness of "pillaring" (particularly when creating shelters in the early game), increase the value of stairs and ladders, and in general to promote a little more thought going into support structure when working on construction projects rather than just placing a column of dirt.

Hardcore Bucket

A modification to the way that water, lava, and buckets work. Lava can no longer be put in a bucket and no longer can water source blocks be collected and placed. It is a mode intended to make fluid flow (and by extension, the generation of mechanical power) far more interesting without causing additional performance overhead, by requiring the player to actually build canals and such to have access to liquids.

The player can drain water using buckets from everywhere, not just water sources - even from waterfalls and canals. When the water is placed, it will not be a source. Instead, it would be a 1x1 block that will quickly disappear, not before destroying any torches and redstone it lands upon, turning lava into obsidian, and activating Detector Blocks.

The player can no longer pick up placed water by right clicking after placing.

Keep in mind that Screw Pump can be used to transport water.

The crafting recipe for buckets has been changed to use iron nuggets instead of iron ingots.

Hardcore Buoy [Optional] [Default]

A Modification that drastically alters the way water-flow is used for item transport and filtration and opens up many filtration possibilities that weren't present in the past. It causes some items to float, some to sink, and some to stay at their current decimal y-level while submerged (neutrally buoyant).

Hardcore Chests

Ender Chests behave like normal chests unless placed on an Ender Block beacon, in which case the following rules apply:

• Chests placed on the first (3x3) tier access a shared inventory, unique to the dimension the beacon is built in.
• Chests placed on the second (5x5) tier access a second shared inventory, unique to the dimension the beacon is built in.
• Chests placed on the third (7x7) tier access a third shared inventory, shared across all dimensions.
• Chests placed on the fourth (9x9) tier access a private inventory.

Hardcore Chicken

Removes the odd chicken behavior of laying eggs randomly and giving live birth. Now you must feed seeds to a chicken, and after being fed, the chicken will eventually lay an egg. To get more chickens you have to then encourage the chick in the egg to hatch out by throwing the egg at the wall. Sometimes a chicken comes hatches out while other times you just kill the chick and raw egg falls out.

Hardcore Darkness

This mode makes coal more valuable by changing the torch recipe to produce only one torch per piece of coal. In order to make furnaces a better emergency lighting method, it also causes furnaces to burn fuels and cook things at half their normal rate (longer periods of lighting for less fuel) and permits furnaces to be fueled and activated without anything being in the cook slot. Charcoal production is now limited to the kiln, and nethercoal has been balanced to produce 4 items and each one burning the same time as regular coal. As of 4.8914, if you place a Jack 'o' Lanterns underwater it will out, this encourages the players to use glowstone to light up their harbors.

Hardcore Explosives

Hardcore Explosives is a gameplay modification to the way explosives are produced.

• Crafting recipe for TNT is disabled and TNT is replaced by Powder Kegs.
• Creepers and Ghasts drop Nitre instead of Gunpowder.
• Gunpowder can be crafted by combining Nitre, Brimstone and Coal Dust in Cauldron

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Gunpowder	Nitre, Brimstone, Coal Dust

• As with all Cauldron recipes involving volatile and/or explosive materials make sure Cauldron is NOT stoked.

Hardcore Fishing

Fishing Rod crafting recipe has been changed:

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Fishing Rod	Shaft, String, Iron Nugget

To catch a fish you need to craft Fishing Rod with bait (Spider Eye, Rotten Flesh, Bat Wings, Creeper Oysters) and you'll obtain Baited Fishing Rod. When you'll catch a fish you'll lose your bait. You can't also fish underground

Hardcore Grinding

A modification to the way that some items are crafted, making them require the Millstone. Here is a list of those vanilla items which can no longer be crafted in the crafting grid. For the full list of items which the millstone can grind go to the Millstone page.

• Sugar Cane -> Sugar
• Bone -> 3 Bonemeal
  • Skull -> 6 Bonemeal
• Rose -> 2 Red Dye
• Dandelion -> 2 Yellow Dye
• Cocoa Beans -> Cocoa Powder

Hardcore Hunger

A Modification to the way the hunger system works and the ways in which food can be obtained. It generally makes food harder to get and less effective at feeding the player. Domestic crops, including wheat, can only be obtained in villages, and all raw meat has a substantial chance to poison the player, which is now more problematic, since you cannot eat while poisoned anymore. It also causes the player to lose hunger points at a very slow rate when doing nothing, resolving an exploit on servers where the player could simply not move in order to not eat, and severely increases the penalties of approaching starvation and actually starving by giving effects such as slowness, mining fatigue, and nausea to the player. It should also be noted that it replaces the saturation system with a "fat" system that is visible on the user interface.

Hardcore Info

This removes any information in the debug menu that can be used to gain an in-game advantage, while leaving in place any info that would be used for tweaking performance and such. It also adds a new display for how close the player is to a chunk boundary, since this can be used to workaround bugs in redstone circuits due to how block updates work in vanilla, while not providing cheaty info about which direction the player is facing.

"Long story short: no more in-game GPS :)" - FC

Hardcore Lactation

This mode makes cows only able to be milked occasionally (similar to chickens laying eggs), and only after eating grass (similar to sheep re-growing wool). A cow's udder now provides a visual indication of whether or not a cow may be milked. Attempting to milk a cow that doesn't have a full udder will cause the cow to panic.

Hardcore Melons

Changes several aspects of Melons and Pumpkins. These effects are related to gravity and the way the blocks are turned into resources.

• When broken melons now drop the block, not the slices
• Pistons no longer break melons, but simply push/pull them like regular blocks
• Melons and pumpkins are now affected by gravity (Jack 'o' Lanterns aren't though)
• When dropped from a great height, melons and pumpkins will break, exploding into a shower of particles and dropping only seeds. They start having small chance to break when falling at least 8 blocks down, and this chance increases with height. The break chance reaches 100% with a 15 block fall.
• Melons and pumpkins break in front of a saw. Melons break into slices, and pumpkins into blocks.

Hardcore Movement

A modification to the way that movement speeds work. Speed now depends on the surface on which the player or mob is travelling over. This encourages the building of roads to allow fast travel, since grass is not a favorable material.

• Hard surfaces or materials used in roads (cobble, brick, gravel, planks, wool, iron, etc.) increase speed
• Soft surfaces (grass, dirt, etc.) use the standard speed
• Surfaces that you would expect to slow you down (tall grass, snow, vines, groth, reeds, etc.) reduce speed
• Soul sand reduces speed more than anything else
• Potions of swiftness have been removed
• Materials in each of these classs will all provide the same bonus or detriment to movement - travel across cobble is equally as fast as travel across gravel, and travel across tall grass is equally as slow as travel across sand.

Hardcore Ores

This makes iron much more difficult to acquire by causing iron ore blocks to smelt into Iron Nuggets rather than ingots. Nine nuggets are needed for an ingot, which is still required for most recipes, though some, such as the compass, clock, and bucket have been re-balanced to use nuggets rather than ingots. Another component of this makes iron a much better tool and armor material by increasing its durability and protection potentials.

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Compass	Iron Nugget, Redstone Dust
Clock	Gold Nugget, Nether Quartz
Bucket	Iron Nugget

Hardcore Packing

The way this works is that if a piston (or a solid block pushed by a piston) pushes certain items into an enclosed space (an empty block surrounded on all sides by solid blocks. It doesn't work on partial blocks with solid surfaces at present, although I may add that in the future), the items will be automatically compressed into block form if they're present in sufficient number to complete the regular recipe (e.g. 4 clay balls for a clay block, 9 Dung for a Dung block). This applies to clay balls, snowballs, flint, bricks, Nether Bricks, Soap, Dung, and the various piles (dirt, sand, gravel, & soul sand). In other words, it basically works to form any simple storage block for items that wouldn't require additional work or tools in their crafting (like Padding or Iron blocks). This is of course very useful in automation builds.

Hardcore Player Names [Optional]

This is largely intended for anarchy servers, where player names act as a rather unfair way of detecting a player's location without line of sight, and of immediately identifying friend or foe (which eliminates a lot of potential tension in encountering another player). It totally disables player names appearing above a player's avatar, but may be disabled in the mod's config file.

Hardcore Sheep

A Modification to the way sheep shearing and breeding works. It prevents sheep from being dyed to a new color permanently and producing offspring of their altered color. In essence, sheep can only be dyed a color for one shearing session. Thus, it makes sheep of unusual color found throughout the world very valuable. In addition to this, sheep now only drop Wool instead of Wool Blocks when killed or sheared.

Hardcore Sinkholes

Falling blocks update when players stand on them, causing them to fall if the blocks are not supported by non-falling blocks. Non-supported falling blocks are created during world generation, when caves are formed underneath sand or gravel blocks. In vanilla Minecraft, these blocks are updated when a block above, below, or beside them is changed. This makes the blocks update when the player steps on them.

Hardcore Soul Mating

If this is enabled, players will always spawn together after dying, regardless of progression.

Hardcore Spawn

This mode changes the respawn location after death to be randomly chosen from within an unknown radius from the original spawn.

• Frequent deaths will result in respawning in the same place
• Going through the portal in The End returns the player to the original spawn point
• Soulforged Steel Block Beacons fix the spawn point of those bound to it with secondary effects

This provides far more impact to death by encouraging exploration and construction over a far larger area, to provide faster travel over large distances. It also prevents idiocy like intentional suicide to get back to the original spawn.

On servers, it also prevents such problems as spawn-camping and players immediately returning to cause problems after they are killed. It thus makes traps and general base defense much more effective. Note that with Hardcore Spawn enabled, spawn build protection is automatically disabled, as it becomes irrelevant.

Hardcore Stratification

Hardcore Strata splits the minecraft world into different layers/strata. Each layer needs a better pick to mine as you go down. The appearance of the strata is also changed the further you go down, moving from the regular stone texture at layer 64, to a darker look closer to bedrock.

Hardcore Tools and Weapons

This modification makes crafting wooden tools other than pickaxes pickaxes and shovels impossible. It also re-balances the burn times in a furnace of different wooden objects and wood types; these new burn times are left to the player to discover.

This also makes iron the lowest tier material from which hoes and swords can be made, thus forcing the player to acquire iron to farm and fight effectively, and eliminating the "stone omni-hoe" of vanilla; this, coupled with hardcore ores, makes iron a much more sought-after and difficult-to-obtain resource. The purpose of this is to make iron more valuable and create a distinct "stone-age" level of technology that the player must play through.

Hardcore Villagers

An overhaul of the value of villagers, iron golems, and villages themselves. This is mostly done by making villages the only source of domestic crops, such as wheat.

• Villagers no longer automatically breed whilst in the vicinity of doors. They now have to be manually bred through a similar method to animals; however, "love mode" is activated with diamonds, not wheat.
• Villagers only produce children of the same class as one of their parents.
• In a similar way to animals, villagers follow you when you are holding a diamond.
• Villagers spawn as zombies. They may be converted to real villagers with soul urns.
• Iron golems no longer spawn naturally, and have to be created by the player.
• Zombies breaking wooden doors and sieges occur in all difficulties (sieges now follow regular spawning rules).
• Slaying villagers will produce massive amounts of XP.

Hardcore Wood

Punching wood will now drop 1 plank, 1 Saw Dust, and 1 Bark. In order to get logs you must now chop trees with an axe. Additionally, splitting logs into planks in the crafting grid now requires combining a log and an axe, with the durability of the axe being consumed for each log cut. Crafting a log in this manner results in 2 planks (instead of vanilla's 4). Saw Dust and Bark being created will scatter around you as you craft, with the planks being the actual crafting result. A Saw may be used to create 4 logs per plank, in addition to the Saw Dust and Bark.

"Punching wood no longer gives you logs." - FC

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Wooden Planks	Wood, axe