Project MMO, Ascend.

Ascend turns Minecraft into a hardcore skill-gated RPG where you start at the bottom and earn everything. When you first spawn you are deliberately weak: only three hearts, reduced movement speed, a small hunger cap, no ability to sprint, and most of the world locked away from you. You cannot just walk up to an iron vein and mine it. You have to prove yourself first. Every meaningful action you take builds experience in one of six skills, and leveling those skills is the only way to grow stronger and open up the game.

The six skills are Woodcutting, Mining, Combat, Farming, Foraging and Athletics, each running from level 1 to level 50 on a moderate exponential curve, so early levels come quickly and mastery takes real commitment. Mining is hard-gated: stone and coal are available early, but iron, gold, redstone, diamond and obsidian each require a specific Mining level before the block will even break, so progression through the tech tree is paced by how much you have actually mined. Woodcutting and Mining also start below normal: at low levels you chop and mine slower than vanilla, and your bare-hands and tool speed climb past normal only as you level, peaking well above vanilla at level 50. Combat works the same way for melee damage, starting weak and ending strong, while Woodcutting, Farming and Foraging grant scaling bonus drops so a high-level player is dramatically more productive than a beginner.

Athletics is the skill that rebuilds your body. As it rises it increases your maximum health from three hearts toward a full bar, raises your movement speed back to and beyond normal, expands your usable hunger, and unlocks sprinting at level 5 along with a sprint stamina pool that grows as you train. Survival is genuinely tougher because of all this: hunger drains steadily over time, eating is capped to your current Athletics level so you cannot overeat your way to safety early on, and because your hunger ceiling starts low the mod provides its own scaled natural regeneration so you can still heal while well fed. Sprinting drains stamina, and once it empties it stays locked until you stop and let it refill, so you cannot tap-sprint forever.

A rebindable key (default K) opens a classic-styled skills screen showing every skill, its level, an experience bar and exactly how far you are from the next level; hovering any skill explains what it does and how to train it. Floating plus-experience popups rise and fade near the bottom of the screen as you play, colored per skill, and they stop once a skill is maxed. Ascend is available for Minecraft 1.20.1, 1.19.2 and 1.18.2 on Forge, and it is designed to be a famous, replayable progression overhaul that makes a fresh world feel like starting a brand new character.

COMMANDS

/ascend - Shows an overview of all six skills with your current level and your experience progress toward the next level.

/ascend guide - Explains how to level every skill and exactly what each level changes or unlocks.

/ascend guide <skill> - Shows the detailed guide for a single skill. The skill can be woodcutting, mining, combat, farming, foraging or athletics.

/ascend popups - Toggles the floating "+XP" popups on or off. This is a personal client setting and does not require operator permission.

/ascend xp <skill> <amount> - Adds experience to one skill. Use a negative amount to remove experience. Requires operator permission.

/ascend xp all <amount> - Adds experience to every skill at once. Use a negative amount to remove experience. Requires operator permission.

/ascend level <skill> <level> - Sets a single skill directly to the given level, from 1 to 50. Requires operator permission.

/ascend max - Sets every skill to the maximum level at once. Requires operator permission.

/ascend reset - Resets every skill back to level 1. Requires operator permission.