Tellus: Real Earth Survival

Build on Preikestolen. Sail the actual North Sea. Walk the Sahara. Set up a logging camp in the boreal forests of British Columbia. Get hypothermia in Patagonia and sunstroke in Death Valley.

This is a real-Earth survival modpack. The overworld is Tellus — a worldgen mod that replaces vanilla terrain with real elevation, real coastlines, and real biomes drawn from actual geographic data. There's only one Earth, but it has a lot of corners worth exploring.

The world

• Tellus generates the entire overworld from real-world topology. Every coastline, fjord, mountain range, river, desert, and forest is in roughly the place you'd find it on a map.
• Distant Horizons 3.0 with Iris and the Solas Shader are preconfigured to render that scale beautifully — see real mountains from real distances.
• The world is vast. The pack is built for long-form survival, multiplayer expedition play, and base-building in places that look like real places.

The tech

A full Create-centric tech tree, paired with Immersive Engineering and The Factory Must Grow for heavy industry.

• Create 6.0 + Create Aeronautics for the airships
• 14 Create addons including TFMG (oil, refining, heavy industry), Big Cannons, Crafts & Additions, New Age, Ironworks, Connected, Encased, Garnished, Power Grid, Power Loader, Copper & Zinc, Dragons Plus, Dreams & Desires, and Enchantment Industry
• Immersive Engineering for high-voltage transmission, multiblock refining, and proper industrial scale alongside Create's elegance
• Farmer's Delight for cooking, crops, and food variety

Survival realism

The pack is tuned for survival realism. You will need to manage:

• Temperature (Tough As Nails) — hypothermia in cold biomes, heatstroke in hot ones, gear and shelter matter
• Thirst (Thirst Was Taken) — hydration as a real resource; rivers and rain matter
• Seasons (Serene Seasons) — yearly cycle with biome shifts
• Diet variety (Spice of Life: Onion) — eating the same thing every day stops being enough

The wildlife is real wildlife: Naturalist populates each biome with species from that part of the world — bears, lions, alligators, deer, foxes — and Better Combat gives melee enough depth that a brown bear is genuinely a problem.

The market

The pack ships with a custom Market Stalls mod — placeable trading blocks with a four-currency system (emeralds, diamonds, oak logs, spruce logs). They exist as a deliberate fallback for the geographic realism problem: when you spawn in Iceland, you don't have easy access to jungle wood; when you spawn in Indonesia, you don't have easy access to spruce. The market stalls bridge those gaps without breaking the survival economy — premium items are emerald-only, common items can be paid for with whatever you have.

Multiplayer-ready

• Open Parties And Claims — chunk claims and a party system
• Xaero's Minimap + World Map — full integration with claim overlays so you can see your party's territory at a glance
• Sophisticated Storage + Sophisticated Backpacks + Carry On for inventory and base logistics
• Chat Heads, No Chat Reports, Better Advancements, Inventory Profiles Next — the standard server quality-of-life set

Sound and decoration

• Sound Physics Remastered — spatial audio with proper occlusion and reverb. Caves sound like caves. Forests sound like forests.
• Ambient Sounds — biome-aware nature sounds layered over everything
• Supplementaries, Chipped, Macaw's suite, Dramatic Doors for build variety and decoration

Performance baseline

• Sodium + Sodium Extra + EntityCulling + ModernFix — the modern performance stack
• EMI + JEI + JER + Jade for recipe and information tooling

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.228+
• Java 21
• RAM: 12 GB minimum, 16 GB recommended

Real-world chunk generation, Distant Horizons render distance, and the Sodium ecosystem all want headroom. Don't allocate less.

Server play

This pack is designed with multiplayer in mind. We strongly recommend pre-generating chunks around your intended spawn area before opening to players — Tellus fetches elevation tiles on demand, so first-time chunk loads are bandwidth-bound. Pre-gen once, smooth gameplay forever.

Get involved

• Issues with Tellus: giurca/Tellus
• Issues with Market Stalls: giurca/marketstalls
• All other mods belong to their respective authors — please support them on Modrinth and CurseForge.

Now go build something on a fjord.