Even Ground - Designed for the casual player.

Less grinding, more playing: No giant farms needed. Better loot, cheaper enchanting, and minecarts that dig tunnels for you.

Even Ground is a light rebalance for Bedrock. It doesn't add a new dimension, a tech tree or a menu system. It changes the numbers and the small details so the world gives back a bit more, and so you can play a full survival game without building a mob grinder, an iron farm or a redstone contraption you had to look up.

Why I made it

This mod was heavily inspired by Klei_Wright’s “Matcha Flavoured” mod, but takes a more vanilla-focused approach. Rather than adding new materials, items, or visuals, it aims to keep the experience as close to vanilla Minecraft as possible.

Most of the choices here came from watching my seven-year-old play. He'd find a village and be disappointed. Empty furnaces, an empty brewing stand, villagers standing around with nothing much to offer. The place looked like people lived there, but there was nothing in it.

Then there was the difficulty. Not that the game is too hard exactly, but the spikes come at the wrong moments: a creeper appearing out of nowhere, four skeletons at once, a spider that keeps up with you no matter what you do.

And the pace. Everything good is a long way off.  "I want to get more iron" or "Why is the golem not spawning", "Mining is boring",  With the answers to those being "build a farm for it", and the farm is usually a video you follow with a schematic and a pile of redstone. That's a fine hobby, but it isn't "playing", and it certainly isn't playing with a seven-year-old.

So the rule for everything in here was: make the world worth exploring, keep the game recognisable, and never require a contraption that I need to google. Lapis lazuli is a much more valuable mineral now, it's minecrafts "magic substance" that used to be only used for enchanting.

Villages feel lived in

• Brewing stands come with blaze powder in them and a few bottles: mostly water or awkward potions, sometimes something finished.
• Furnaces, smokers and blast furnaces have coal and a batch of food, ore or glass in them, usually caught part way through cooking.
• Bells call for help. Ring one in a village and a golem arrives at dawn. It's a backup, not a replacement: it lets a village keep one more golem than it could raise on its own, one per day.
• Villagers run home when monsters come close, and iron golems take it personally when a villager is hurt: they range further, chase harder, and drop a block of iron one time in ten.
• Nitwits can be talked round with a golden apple, so an unlucky village isn't stuck with them. (No more need to murder the useless).

Exploring pays

• Buried treasure and every shipwreck chest can hold netherite (8%), blaze powder, emeralds or diamonds.
• Nether fortress chests have a 1% chance of a netherite upgrade template, and 1% of a netherite ingot.
• Wrecks above the waterline have a crew aboard: zombie villagers or pillagers, at least one below decks.
• Mob spawners are worth breaking: 32 lapis, a blaze rod and a large chunk of experience.
• Endermen always drop a pearl, so a trip to the End doesn't stall on bad luck.

Costs that don't sting

• Enchanting table: the number it shows you is charged in lapis, not levels, so your levels come back. Past 15 bookshelves it gets cheaper, up to a max of 32 where you get the most out of enchanting.
• Anvil: repairs and renames are free — you get the levels back. (The game's own "Too Expensive!" wall still applies.)
• Broken anvils can be repaired on a crafting table with two iron ingots.
• A stonecutter under a block makes that block drop as itself, which is a silk touch alternative.
• Chopping trees down with an axe drops the whole tree. With Axes above wooden ones though.
• Potions last twice as long as some foods offer now give a magic effect: glow berries give night vision, cake gives speed and haste, cookies a short sprint, pufferfish water breathing plus anything that you have to prep in a bowl.

Mobs, retuned rather than nerfed

• Spiders and cave spiders have 2 hearts; skeletons half their health; creepers are a bit softer and much rarer in the open.
• Zombies are fast in daylight and ordinary underground; spiders are fast and aggressive underground, unless you're holding any Bane of Arthropods, which they avoid whenever possible.
• Anything burning in the sun backs off. Zombies and skeletons on fire stop chasing you or the villagers and get out of the way until the flames are out.
• Pillager outposts don't restock during the day, and clearing one in daylight means fewer of them return that night.
• Blazes can spawn over the Nether's open lava seas.
• Polar bears can be calmed with rotten flesh.
• Allays bond with whoever comes near, don't burn, carry their own light, and fetch any dropped item for you.

Trading both ways

Every villager trade can be done backwards: if a villager sells it, you can sell it back. Gear sells back for half, and only genuinely discounted trades earn the villager experience. The wandering trader sells a villager spawn egg and buys any music disc.

**Two minecarts that dig for you**

The one piece of machinery in here, and the one thing that isn't strictly vanilla.

• Advanced Boring Machine (stonecutter + minecart with chest + block of redstone) bores a 3x3 tunnel, lays rail as it goes, and bridges gaps with blocks it carries — including the cobblestone it has just mined.
• Simple Boring Machine (grindstone + minecart with chest + block of redstone) does the same one block wide.

Push one by hand and it rolls like a minecart. Put it on powered rail and it drives itself, no redstone needed. It only mines natural ground, so it stops at ores and at anything you built, and it never touches rails or torches. What it mines goes inside it, and when it wears out it turns back into a minecart with a chest holding everything it collected.

If that's not your thing, there's a second download without them. Everything else above is identical.

When you die

You choose when you respawn: keep your things and lose your experience, drop them where you died and keep your experience, or play it exactly as vanilla does. If you have StoneTombs installed, this switches itself off and leaves your death to that mod.

Beating the dragon changes the world

The first kill quiets the surface: no hostile spawns in the open except spiders. The second turns off every mob change in the mod. The third puts them all back, and it cycles from there. Nothing announces it — you just notice.

New Additions for 1.1.0:

whole-tree chopping! (beyond the wooden axe choppes entire trees)

Including some much needed boring machine fixes and QOL improvements.

New recipes

• Arrows from nuggets: a copper nugget or iron nugget works in place of flint (nugget, stick, feather → 4 arrows). The flint recipe still works too.
• Enchanted Golden Apple: a golden apple surrounded by 8 blocks of lapis lazuli.
• Explorer Map: 8 paper around a block of lapis lazuli crafts an explorer map to a random nearby structure: a plains, desert or snowy village, trial chambers, a jungle temple, desert pyramid, swamp hut, buried treasure, an ocean monument or a woodland mansion.

Horses, donkeys and mules

• An enchanted golden apple tames a wild horse, donkey or mule instantly.
• Feeding one to a tamed horse makes it faster, up to the vanilla maximum. The slowest possible horse reaches top speed in 5 apples.
• Donkeys and mules have a fixed speed, so for them it tames and heals only.
• An animal already at full health and top speed doesn't use up the apple.

Notes before you install

• Works on 1.26.x. Tested on 1.26.45 and 1.26.51. It won't run on older versions.
• No experimental toggles needed, but the host has to allow add-on scripts.
• It includes its own copies of six mobs (zombie, zombie villager, skeleton, stray, drowned, iron golem) and all 14 villager trade tables, so it will clash with other mods that change those.
• No custom menus and no chat messages. Every screen is the one the game already had. The only thing the mod ever puts on screen is the respawn choice.
• Safe to add to an existing world. Villages, wrecks and stations are set up the first time you come near them, and nothing is removed.
  
  

  Free to use in your own worlds and on your own server, public or private. Videos and streams are welcome — a link back is appreciated. Please don't reupload the files anywhere; link to the CurseForge page instead. For translations, modpacks or anything built on top of it, just ask.
  
  I'm always open to suggestions so feel free to post them in the comments.