Evolution

You become what you do.

Evolution never asks you to pick a class. It watches how you play.

Every sprint, every blow landed, every dive, every night spent underground is measured. Your character adapts to what you actually do — not to a box you ticked on day one.

Two players who start the same world will not end up with the same character.

How it works

38 behavioural stats rise on their own as you play. Running feeds Running and Endurance. Diving deep feeds Aquatic Adaptation. Taking hits forges Resilience.

Those stats unlock 44 passive traits, then 107 evolutions across seven tiers — 30 common, 20 advanced, 15 hybrid, 10 legendary and 10 secret ones that never announce themselves.

HUMAN
  ├── ATHLETE ───── ACROBAT ───── GALE WALKER ───── STORMBORN
  ├── WARRIOR ───── BERSERKER ─── WARLORD
  ├── EXPLORER ──── NOMAD ─────── WORLD WALKER
  └── SWIMMER ───── DIVER ─────── ABYSS WALKER ──── ABYSSAL SOVEREIGN

Some evolutions merge two branches. A berserker who also studied the arcane can become a Blood Mage — but only if both paths were genuinely walked.

Others are mutually exclusive. Committing to the berserkers closes the monk's road for good. Your choices carry weight.

Pacing you can feel

Progress is quick at the start and stays honest: on whatever you are actively doing, expect around level 5 after five minutes, level 30 after an hour, level 50 after two.

More importantly, every stat runs at the same pace. That sounds obvious and it wasn't: because walking is sampled twenty times a second while brewing happens once a minute, some stats used to reach level 50 in six minutes and others in nearly two hours. Each of the 38 was measured against an hour of focused play and calibrated to the same target.

One setting, xpScale, moves the whole mod faster or slower without breaking that balance.

Mana and magic

A mana bar sits under your health. It powers 24 abilities — active, passive and toggle.

Abilities level up through use. An ability you rely on becomes stronger and cheaper.

Magirite

Five magical ores, each in its own dimension:

Each yields a full equipment set — armour, sword, bow, four tools — plus two weapons found nowhere else.

The wand fires an arcane bolt in the exact colour of its material. The grimoire strikes up to six enemies at once. No ammunition: only mana, and the rarer the Magirite, the less it costs.

The focus is an amulet that lightens all your magic, simply by being carried.

The Reinforcement Altar

Got a level 40 wooden pickaxe and a brand new diamond one? The altar transfers the levels across.

The transfer destroys the source tool and loses 80% of the levels. That loss shrinks with your Arcane stat and the rarity of the Magirite you spend — down to 15% at best, never less.

Crafting the altar takes one gem of every tier. You must have seen all five Magirite, the End included.

The screen spells the operation out: each slot is labelled — Destroyed, Enhanced, Magirite — with an arrow showing which way the levels travel, and the exact gain and loss shown before you press anything. Nothing here should be discovered afterwards.

Crafting

Every recipe below works with any of the five Magirite. M is the gem of the tier you want; the tier decides the stats, never the shape. Learn the grid once and it holds from white to yellow.

Tools and weapons

Vanilla layouts, so nothing new to memorise.

  Sword          Pickaxe         Axe           Shovel        Hoe
  . M .          M M M          M M .          . M .        M M .
  . M .          . S .          M S .          . S .        . S .
  . S .          . S .          . S .          . S .        . S .

Armour

  Helmet         Chestplate      Leggings       Boots
  M M M          M . M           M M M          . . .
  M . M          M M M           M . M          M . M
  . . .          M M M           M . M          M . M

The magical weapons

Neither takes ammunition. Both spend mana, and the rarer the Magirite the less each shot costs.

  Wand           Bow             Grimoire
  . . M          . M S           M M M
  . S .          M . S           M B M
  S . .          . M S           M M M

  S = stick      S = string      B = book

The wand fires an arcane bolt in the colour of its material. The grimoire strikes up to six enemies at once.

Magical items

  Focus          Lamp            Mana Potion (shapeless)
  . C .          . g .           glass bottle + 2 lapis + glowstone dust
  . M .          g M g
  G G G          . g .           or, cheaper: 1 Magirite of any tier
                                 + glass bottle + glowstone dust
  C = chain      g = glowstone
  G = gold ingot

The focus is an amulet: carry it and every spell you cast costs less. The lamp is decorative light in the colour of its gem.

Storage and the altar

  Magirite Block     9 gems  →  1 block, and back again for 9

  Reinforcement Altar
  W G B      W/G/B/P/Y = one gem of each tier
  P O Y      O = obsidian
  S S S      S = smooth stone

Place the altar and right-click it to transfer levels from one tool to another.

When a stat hits its ceiling

Level 100 used to be the end of that stat. Actions kept being counted and thrown away, and nothing said so.

Prestige gives that moment a use: reset the stat to zero and its ceiling rises by 10. Five ranks in, the ceiling is 150 — the stat ends up stronger than it ever was, which is what makes the reset worth accepting. Every rank also speeds up experience on all your stats, because a prestige that slowed you down overall is a prestige nobody would ever take.

Ascension is the same idea at the scale of a character. Five prestige ranks and a legendary evolution let you wipe the current life — every stat, every trait, every evolution — and keep only what outlives it: your mutations, your prestige ranks, the biomes you know, and a permanent two hearts per ascension.

Both are deliberate, both are irreversible, and neither ever triggers on its own. Ascension asks for confirmation twice and tells you exactly what you are about to lose.

/evolution prestige          what is ready, what you have
/evolution prestige mining   spend it
/evolution ascend            what you would lose
/evolution ascend confirm    go through with it

Mutations

Twelve alterations that arrive rather than being earned. Every time you reach a new evolution there is a small chance something shifts — and it is not always in your favour.

Five are pure gains. Six trade one quality for another: Dense Bones give armour and take speed, Hollow Frame gives speed and takes two hearts, Overclocked Heart hits harder and guards worse. One is simply an affliction.

Mutations are permanent. There is no way to remove one, and that is the point: an alteration you can undo becomes a piece of equipment you optimise. This one you live with.

The double-edged ones are deliberately the most common. A random roll that only ever helps you is not randomness, it is a reward with extra steps.

The world learns from you

Two systems, and they read different things.

Eight omens, one per stat category, answer what you have become. Spend your time underground and the stone starts remembering you — every vein within reach lights up at once. Fight for a living and something eventually follows your trail to where you sleep. None of them changes the world permanently: a rare event that wrecks your build is an event you regret, and nothing undoes it.

And the world watches how you fight.

Spend your time with a sword, and some monsters — 1 to 5%, never all of them — start appearing hardened against melee. Switch to the bow, and the world adapts again, gradually.

Elites appear, carrying stacking affixes: vampiric, berserker, frozen, reflective. Harder, better rewarded.

And if you kill enough, something eventually takes notice.

A strange presence has noticed you.

Your Nemesis is born, takes the body of what you hunt, and finds you. It learns your fighting style over successive encounters — not instantly — and develops counters. It evolves: Hunter, Stalker, Nemesis, Apex Hunter.

Killing it pays well. It comes back anyway.

Hunger still bites

The Hunger stat and the metabolism traits slow how fast the food bar drains. They never stop it.

That distinction is deliberate. Slowing is a reward; stopping would quietly delete a whole layer of the game — no more farming, no more cooking, no more reason to carry food. At level 100 with every metabolism trait, the bar still empties in about six and a half minutes of sprinting, against two and a half for a fresh character. A hard floor in the config makes it structurally impossible to go further, whatever you set.

A weaker start

You begin with six hearts, not ten.

Every health bonus in the mod — from stats, traits and evolutions — then becomes something you feel. Crossing back over ten hearts is a real milestone rather than a rounding error.

Not to your taste? One line in the config restores the vanilla ten.

Everything else

• Magic Bag — storage that opens row by row as you progress, up to 45 slots
• Sorting buttons in your inventory and every chest: sort, deposit matching, deposit all
• Unbreakable gear that gains levels through use
• Tree felling — break the base, the whole tree comes down
• 24 advancements — a full tree, from your first ten levels to the legendary evolutions and the Nemesis. Install the mod mid-save and you get the ones you already earned
• Full Moon Gift — a hidden discovery, yours to find
• Complete interface — stats, traits, the full seven-tier evolution tree with hybrid links drawn on hover, abilities, and a searchable codex of everything the mod contains
• Experience overlay on the left edge: what rose, by how much, and how far the next level is — at whatever opacity you choose
• Its own sound and its own particle — eight synthesised sounds and a slow rising mote, instead of borrowing the vanilla totem and firework. The stat chime rises in pitch with the level, so progress is audible without a single line of text
• Hand-drawn pixel art, 113 textures built from one template per item so all five Magirite tiers stay identical but for their colour

Controls

All nine are rebindable in Options → Controls → Evolution, and none of them collides with a vanilla binding by default.

Press O and you get a small settings screen with a live preview: the experience overlay is drawn at the opacity you are choosing, right there, so you can dial it in without closing anything. Changes save as you make them. These are per-player settings — on a server, yours are yours.

The six ability keys are slots, not abilities. Minecraft cannot register new keys while the game is running, so instead of one key per ability, the mod gives you six fixed slots and lets you decide from the Evolution screen which ability sits in each. Unlock a twenty-fifth ability and you still have exactly six keys to press — you just choose what they do.

The bar in the bottom-left of the HUD shows the current six, with their key and their cooldown.

Two keys you already have. Your inventory and every chest gain three buttons in the top-right corner: sort, deposit matching, deposit all. They work on the container you are looking at, and on the magic bag too.

The magic bag starts empty. Its first row opens at global level 5, then one more row every 12 levels — 17, 29, 41, 53 — up to five rows and 45 slots. Global level is the average of all your stats, so the bag rewards broad progress rather than grinding one skill. Both thresholds are configurable.

Configuration

Start here:

/evolution preset gentle | balanced | demanding

Ninety-odd options is a lot to face. Three presets set the fifteen that actually decide how the mod feels — pace, starting health, decay, elites, the Nemesis, loot. Roughly one hour to level 50 on gentle, two on balanced, three and a half on demanding.

The command writes into the config file rather than layering invisible values over it, so you can still adjust anything afterwards. A preset is a starting point, not a mode.

108 settings in config/evolution-common.toml for the world, and 4 in evolution-client.toml for what you see.

The split matters in multiplayer: the common file belongs to the server, so display settings live apart. On a server, your HUD is yours — press O and change it, nobody else is affected.

Three of them deserve a mention, because they let you shape the mod to your taste rather than merely switch it off:

Overall pace. xpScale is the single lever for how fast everything levels. Doubling it halves every timing at once, and because all 38 stats are calibrated against it, nothing drifts out of balance.

[progression]
    xpScale = 35.0

Attribute tuning. Each of the 16 attributes the mod touches has a scale and a max. Jumping too high for your liking?

[attributes.jump_strength]
    scale = 1.0
    max = 0.05

You keep progressing in Jumping — only the effect is bounded.

Automatic effects. The 15 effects that fire on their own — night vision, life steal, auto-smelting, regeneration — each switch off independently, without disabling the trait or ability that carries them.

Every system can be turned off on its own.

Compatibility

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.244 or later
• Java 21
• Singleplayer and multiplayer — each player has their own progression, and their own display settings
• Full English and French translations
• No other mod required, and no dependency beyond NeoForge
• Evolutions load from data files: a datapack can add or rebalance them without touching the code

Licence

MIT. Do what you like with it, modpacks included.

You become what you do — and what you become changes the world.