The Buried Age

Something's sticking out of that hill

A column. Maybe the raised hand of a statue, or just a patch of ground that caved in. Whatever it is, it's the top of something much bigger, and the rest is still down there under fifteen blocks of dirt.

Go get a shovel.

A whole city, sealed underground

The Buried Age generates entire ancient Greek cities completely entombed in the earth. Not in a cave. Not ruins scattered on the surface. Sealed inside solid stone: streets, houses, a pottery workshop, a theatre, a villa, an agora with its colonnade collapsed, a treasury, and if you're lucky, a temple.

You dig it out yourself. That's the mod.

Some rooms survived. You'll break through a wall expecting more rubble and drop into a chamber nobody has stood in for three thousand years. Others are packed to the ceiling with debris and suspicious gravel, which is where your brush earns its keep.

Cities are laid out in four districts radiating from the agora, so the rich quarter, the poor quarter and the temple road all go their own way. A quartz column runs from the surface marker straight down to the agora, so once you spot the hint you can dig down without missing.

The Forge of Hephaestus

Deep in the temple, if the city has one, there's a cold stone hearth with a hammer resting on it.

No interface. No menu. You pin an Ancient Blueprint to the stele, drop a diamond block in the niche, lay your weapon on the anvil, and hit it three times.

The enchantment named on that blueprint goes one level past its vanilla ceiling. Sharpness VI. Fortune IV. Protection V. Efficiency VI. I went through the whole enchantment list and included every one where +1 stays interesting without breaking the game, and skipped the ones where it doesn't. Quick Charge IV turns a crossbow into a machine gun. Breach V deletes armor as a concept. Those aren't in.

Blueprints are single use, and each enchantment can only be pushed once per item, so a fully upgraded sword means a lot of cities.

I also fixed the case where a vanilla anvil would quietly strip that extra level back off. Losing a reward you dug three cities for is not a fun surprise.

Wrath of Zeus

One enchantment exists on a single blueprint hidden in city treasuries. No enchanting table, no villager, no loot chest anywhere else.

Every fourth hit calls lightning down on whatever you're fighting.

The Field Journal

Craft a book and quill with a brush and you get a journal that fills itself in as you dig.

67 entries: our sherds and blueprints, vanilla archaeology finds, and a page for every building type in the city. Building pages list the loot that structure actually yields, pulled from its real loot tables, so you learn where to dig for what instead of guessing. Anything you haven't found yet sits there as a silhouette.

Vanilla handed players a brush and then gave them almost nothing worth brushing for. This is my answer to that.

The Pegasus

Rare eggs turn up in the gravel. Place one anywhere, wait about fifteen minutes, and a foal hatches that's already yours.

Saddle the adult and fly. This isn't elytra flight. It's real physics: run and jump to take off, hold space to climb, dive to trade altitude for speed, bank into your turns, stall if you pull up too steeply. Stamina sits on the vanilla jump bar. Climbing burns it fast, level flight slowly, gliding gives it back. So a long trip becomes a rhythm of climbing and diving instead of holding one key.

Feed it a golden apple when you're running low and the pegasus takes the apple instead of you.

Enchanted golden apples breed them. Losing one is permanent, so fly carefully.

Also in here

Wandering traders sell a map to the nearest buried city. Four Greek pottery sherds with their own decorated pot patterns. Coin pouches and decorated pots scattered through the ruins. Sixteen advancements extending vanilla's archaeology. And the ghosts of the city's former residents, still walking streets that have been underground for millennia.

What's coming

Greece is the first civilization, not the last. The city generator is built so new ones slot in with their own palette and their own mechanic rather than being a reskin — an Egyptian city buried under the desert, Atlantis on the ocean floor, and more after that.

The Greek city isn't finished either. There are more buildings to add, more reasons to dig, and more that the forge and the journal can do. Everything stays in vanilla style: no HD textures, no new blocks where a vanilla one does the job.

Requirements

Minecraft 26.1.x, NeoForge, and GeckoLib 5.5.2 or newer (required, the pegasus animations need it).

A fresh world is recommended. The mod works fine in existing worlds, but cities generated before 1.1.0 don't have the markers the journal reads.

Built for CurseForge ModJam 2026.