Progression Overhaul

This pack reshapes early–mid game progression into a more intuitive, meaningful, and rewarding experience by slowing progression in certain areas, rebalancing loot and crafting, and encouraging interaction with Minecraft features that are often overlooked. The goal is not to make the game harder, but rather smarter, more logical, and more satisfying. You’ll rediscover Minecraft as though you're playing it for the first time, but with modern polish and quality-of-life improvements.

Crafting and Smelting

A redesigned dual-path progression system:

Smelting Branch

• Furnaces now smelt raw ores into nuggets only.
• Full ingots require the Blast Furnace.
• Blast Furnaces offer better efficiency and yield.

Cooking Branch

• Food can only be cooked with:
  • Campfires: slower, cooks 4 items at a time, unlit by default
  • Smokers: faster, requires fuel
  • Regular furnaces no longer cook food.
  • Smokers require a campfire and supporting materials to craft, creating a linear progression of cooking

Additional Crafting Changes

• All armor requires leather armor as a base layer.
• Trims copy in a reversed recipe (1 diamond → 7 material), making it cheaper.
• Fishing rods, brushes, lightning rods use nuggets in recipes.
• Campfire recipe no longer uses coal, but is unlit by default
• Tools, weapons, and armor cannot be repaired in crafting grids.

Loot Table Overhauls

A major rebalance designed to make environments matter and tools feel more impactful.

• Iron and gold ore drop more raw materials (matching copper).
• Diamonds reduced in general loot (except endgame structures).
• Crops drop 1 crop + seeds unless harvested with a hoe.
• Hoes restore normal or improved drops (affected by fortune).
  • Hoes lose durability when harvesting.
  • Stripped logs: -Drop regular logs when broken by hand -Drop themselves when mined with an axe
  • Scorch enchantment smelts blocks upon breaking.
  • Biome-dependent fishing loot
    • Fish can only be caught in the biome where their entity equivalent spawns

Enchantments

• Aqua Affinity is now a chestplate exclusive enchantment
• Mending has been removed from elytra
  • Elytra repair cost no longer increases
  • New pickaxe enchantment: Scorch
    • Smelts blocks as they are mined
    • Mutually exclusive with Silk-Touch.
  • Horse armor can now be enchanted with most armor Enchantments
    • Horse armor now has durability

Other Changes

• Wooden tools durability increased to 80.
• Eyes of Ender can now locate End Cities.
• Several gamerules adjusted:
  • global_sound_events = false
  • max_minecart_speed = 80
  • players_nether_portal_default_delay = 0
  • Campfires are placed unlit for realism and balance.

Parts of the pack are still evolving. Feedback is welcome!