Survivalist Mod 1.16.5→1.8.9: Making Early-Game More Involved

This Survivalist Mod 1.16.5→1.8.9 mod tries to improve the early game by adding an extra layer of difficulty, but not making it too difficult for those who are new to Survival Mode. This Survivalist Mod 1.16.5 is oriented around making early games slightly more involved so that you can’t just mindlessly play Survival mode, but also trying to avoid giving the feeling of “what have I done to deserve this?”

Make sure you have already installed Minecraft Forge.
Relative post: Minecraft forge

Getting Started:

The first surprise for a long-time Minecraft player, will be that you can’t just punch a tree and get sticks out of the wood. Instead, the easy way to get sticks is to remove the branches out of the saplings (that is, you craft them on any grid).

Or maybe, your first instinct is to get a crafting grid by turning one Log into planks… except that won’t work anymore. You have to first create a chopping block, then place a log on it, and then chop, chop, chop…. click repeatedly, you can’t just leave the mouse button down (not yet implemented). Note however, that your hands are not that good at chopping, so you will want to get some sort of Axe as soon as possible. The better the axe, the more effective chopping will be.

So, you finally got your crafting grid. You made yourself some wooden tools, and tried to get some cobblestone, right? Then you have discovered that it’s not so easy. Cobblestone is not free anymore. You will have to find a lake, and get some clay from it, so that you can combine 8 rocks into one block of cobblestone.

Early defense

If you happen to have some torches around, and you encounter an enemy with no weapon at hand, why don’t you try sticking it into their eyes? Chances are it will break, but you’ll at least have the mob scrambling around in flames…. be careful with that.

Smelting

Your next step will be to find some iron, as usual, except iron ore now drops a bunch of ore rocks. As soon as you put them on the furnace, you’ll realize they turn into nuggets, rather than full ingots. Don’t worry you can craft them into ingots later, you’ll just need to mine a bit more than usual.

Food and Armor

By this point, you may be wondering how long it will take for you to craft a full iron set. The good news is, you don’t need to! You can use 4 iron nuggets in a diamond shape to craft a piece of chain-mail. Then you can use those pieces of chain-mail in the usual shapes to make chain armor.

+--+--+--+
|  |IN|  |
+--+--+--+
|IN|  |IN|
+--+--+--+
|  |IN|  |
+--+--+--+ where IN=Iron nugget

If that feels too slow, you can explore the field instead. Go prancing around until you find some cows, and slaughter them into leather and beef. Don’t craft yourself leather armor just yet! That’s really raw hide you have there! You’ll want to tan it into proper leather first, using the Drying Rack. And while you are at it, you may want to put some cooked beef in it to make jerky. If you try to dry it raw, it will spoil before it’s done! Not that it matters, since you can actually turn spoiled meat into jerky too. Jerky isn’t too nutritious, but it will keep you distracted for a bit.

Scraping

You may be used to think that when things break, there’s nothing left for you to reuse. That’s no longer the case.

When a tool or armor breaks, you’ll get one of the pieces it was crafted with. There’s a Scraping enchantment, that can help with recovering better materials out of it.

Silk touch

You can work around the rock mechanics by using Silk Touch tools. Ores will drop the ore, cobble and stone will drop themselves. Once you have silk touch, you can just get yourself a cobble generator and get as many of it as you want.

Features:

Everything listed below can be turned off on the config file:

• Sticks are no longer directly craftable from planks.
  • Get them by placing sheared leaves and saplings in a crafting grid.
  • Break planks into sticks in the Chopping Block.
• Rocks and Ore Rocks
  • Mining stone drops rocks (4) instead of cobble. In order to craft cobblestone, you’ll need clay.
    • Andesite, Diorite and Granite drop rocks, too.
    • Any 4 will turn into gravel, which can be crafted again into 4 generic rocks. All the cobblestone!
    • The corresponding blocks are crafted by surrounding a ball of clay with 8 rocks.
  • Mining iron/gold now drops ore rocks (2..4), which smelt for one nugget each.
  • Mod Ore Rocks and their corresponding nuggets
    • Metals supported: Copper, Tin, Lead, Silver
    • Same rules as the gold and iron rocks
• Tools and armor drop one of their crafting components.
  • Enchant tools with Scraping I/II/III to increase the chances it’s the GOOD item.
  • Enchant armor with Scraping I/II/III to increase the chances it’s two instead.
• Craftable chainmail!
  • Iron nuggets in a diamond shape make chainmail pieces
  • Chainmail pieces are then materials for crafting the armor.
• Torches can set things on fire!
  • But they have a rather high chance of breaking in the process.
• Drying rack
  • Turn meat into jerky: not too nutritive, but highly saturating.
  • Turn leather (which really, should be called hide), into tanned leather, for improved armour.
• Chopping block
  • Crafted from Logs
  • Click repeatedly until the placed block breaks (TODO: allow continuous holding)
  • Allows chopping logs into planks
  • Allows chopping planks into sticks
  • Yield depends on axe harvest level (be careful, using your hands has a high probability of not yielding any item!)
  • NEW: You can chop wool into strings (although it’s a rather inefficient process — and will never yield more string than needed to make a wool block)
• JEI Integration
  • Drying recipes show input, output and drying time
  • Chopping recipes show input, output, and average number of resulting items