TONI's Better Desert Temples

The vanilla desert pyramid is a box with an orange carpet, a hole in the floor and four chests you can loot in thirty seconds. Better Desert Temples replaces it with the thing that box was always a placeholder for: a stepped temple mountain of five tiers, a nine-wide processional stair up its south face, a shrine on the summit, a pillared hall inside it, catacombs under it and a burial vault under those - walled up from the inside, with the king still in it.

Everything is assembled from jigsaw pieces, so the tombs that hang off the catacombs and the camps out on the sand are different at every temple. A red sandstone cousin generates in the badlands.

Forty-one blocks on a side at the base and twenty-eight to the gilt capstone, built in battered tiers of cut sandstone with an overhanging cornice on each and chiselled quoins up every corner. Four thousand years of wind have taken bites out of the faces and banked sand against the podium.

A nine-wide flight of stairs is notched into the south face at exactly the slope of the tiers, so it juts out at the foot of each one and cuts into it at the head. Lamps every third step, a parapet either side, guardian statues and two standards at the bottom, and a gate of battered pylons closing the avenue of sphinxes below.

At the top: an eleven by eleven shrine open on all four sides, banded in the orange and blue terracotta of the vanilla temple, with gilded columns, braziers, offering chests and an altar on the head of the newel - and a hole in the floor where the stair down begins.

The whole ground floor of the pyramid is one hypostyle hall: eight papyrus columns with flared capitals, a coffered ceiling with a lantern in every fourth coffer, registers of hieroglyphs on every wall and a sunburst mosaic across the floor.

Six chapels are sunk into the walls - some with a chest, some with a sarcophagus, some with suspicious sand that nobody has brushed yet. Sand has blown into the corners and buried things in it. A spiral stair runs up the spine of the building to the shrine and down to the dead.

Grave robbers got here first: a propped-up tunnel breaks through the north face, with their camp still outside it.

Ten blocks under the plaza, the Hall of the Dead: rows of sarcophagi along both walls, some lidded, some not, and some with a tomb guard still lying in them. Four corridors run out from it with burial niches down their length, and four corner chambers ring the whole thing on a circuit of passages.

• The Scribe's Archive - shelves of scrolls, a lectern and a dig somebody abandoned.
• The Decoy Treasury - the trap you already know, rebuilt at this scale: a sunken floor of coloured terracotta, four chests in the corners of the pit and nine charges of TNT under the plate.
• The Hall of Jars - rows of canopic pots, a great deal of cobweb and a husk spawner behind them.
• The Embalming Chamber - basins, brewing stands, a body still on the slab and cave spiders.

Each of the four corridors ends in a side tomb picked at random from five: a pillared burial chapel, a shaft dropping to a lower chamber, a flooded cistern cut like a stepwell, a gallery the desert has broken into, and one that is nothing but cobweb and cave spiders now.

The spiral stair keeps going past the catacombs. At the bottom the last flight has been walled up from the inside, which is a problem for the people who did the walling and not for you.

Behind it: the burial chamber, twenty-one blocks square, its floor laid in gold and terracotta rays, four guardian statues, braziers of soul fire and a canopy over the open sarcophagus of the Sand King - a gilded husk with thirty hearts who would rather you left. The treasure is stacked along both walls.

The temple stands on a paved podium with four corner obelisks, braziers, a broken colonnade and an avenue of sphinxes running south to the gate. Three more sites are picked at random and attached to the plaza:

• Caravan camp - striped ridge tents, crates, camels and a cooking fire.
• Queen's pyramid - a smaller tomb with its shoulder slumped into the sand and one chamber inside.
• Excavation - trenches, scaffolds, a buried wall half uncovered and a cartography table.
• Stepwell - four flights down to black water, with a shrine looking over it.
• Obelisk court - a walled forecourt with a single great needle and offering tables.

Every room has its own chest table, and the richest ones also roll the vanilla desert pyramid table, so whatever Mojang puts in it - dune trim templates, pottery sherds and the rest - still turns up on the versions that have them. Suspicious sand is scattered through the hall, the archive and the dig, with the vanilla archaeology loot behind it.

Every version from 1.19 to 26.3: Fabric and Quilt (needs Fabric API / QFAPI) on all of them, Forge on every version Forge shipped for, and NeoForge from 1.20.1 on. Pick the file that matches your game.

The mod is pure data - structures, template pools, processors, loot tables and biome tags - so it is safe on servers (clients do not need it) and you can override any of it with a data pack.

It requires TONI's Structure Lib, the shared requirement of the structure series: install it alongside and the temples load; without it the game stops at the mod list. The lib is server-side and adds nothing on its own.

• Replaces vanilla pyramids in newly generated chunks; the ones you have already found are left alone.
• Keeps vanilla spacing, rarity and salt, so /locate still works and existing temple sites do not move.
• Adds betterdeserttemples:temple_badlands, a red sandstone temple in badlands biomes.
• Needs TONI's Structure Lib installed, on every version and loader.
• Biome mods: anything added to the vanilla desert pyramid biome tag gets the new temple.
• 1.19 is the floor - before it a data pack cannot redefine the pyramid at all, because vanilla builds it from hard-coded blocks with no template pool to override.

Do I need any other mod?
Yes, one: TONI's Structure Lib. Every mod in the series requires it, so the game will not start without it. It is server-side and adds nothing by itself. On Fabric you also need Fabric API.

Do I need it on the client?
No. It is a server-side data mod. Installing it on a client as well is harmless.

Can I add it to an existing world?
Yes. Pyramids in chunks you have not generated yet will be the new ones.

How do I find one?
/locate structure minecraft:desert_pyramid, or betterdeserttemples:temple_badlands for the red sandstone one.

Does it break the old trap?
No - it is still down there, with four chests and nine TNT, just somewhere you have to earn.

Is it compatible with other structure mods?
Yes, unless the other mod also rewrites minecraft:desert_pyramid. It only touches that structure, its structure set and its own namespace.

Modpacks?
Go ahead.