01 — InstallingGetting it into a world

1. Open LifeInMinecraft.mcaddon on a device with Minecraft Bedrock installed. Minecraft launches and imports both packs.
2. In the world's settings, add the Life in Minecraft — Behaviour pack. The resource pack is a declared dependency, so it comes along automatically; if your version asks, add Life in Minecraft — Resources as well.
3. Nothing experimental needs switching on. The pack uses the stable scripting API only.
4. Join the world. A form asks who you are before your first breath — that choice sets your fertile window and a few years of lifespan.

02 — The bodyNine stages, and what each one does to you

Every stage rescales and re-poses your player model, changes what your body can do, and caps how much of the health bar you can actually fill.

The trade runs in one direction the whole way through. Adolescence is the fastest and strongest you will ever be; a Venerable player mines slowly but reads the world well enough to take 2.4× experience from it and shrugs off damage a teenager would take in full. The health cap is a ceiling, not a bar change — you still see twenty hearts, you just cannot fill past the cap, and poor condition lowers it further.

Age never takes an ability away

No life stage applies Weakness, so a swing always lands at any age, and Mining Fatigue never goes past level I, so a pickaxe always works. An infant is slow and has six hearts to lose — it is not barred from mining a block or killing a chicken. Illness and injury can still weaken you, but only ever by Weakness I, which is a penalty rather than a lockout.

This is enforced in one place rather than trusted to each definition: every effect the pack applies passes through a single cap — Weakness and Mining Fatigue at level I, Slowness at level II — so no stage, illness or injury can exceed it even by mistake. The test suite asserts it against every effect applied across a full simulated life.

Posture, not just size

Each stage plays a looping animation over the vanilla ones. Infants stand splay-limbed with an oversized head and wobble; adolescents get a slight backward swagger and a breathing bob; elders bend forward at the hips and tremble; the Venerable are bent almost double. Two overlays sit on top of that: a limp while a leg is broken, and a sickened stoop while a serious illness is running.

All of it is done with scale and rotation only — no position offsets anywhere. Size is one value on the root bone, whose pivot already sits between the feet; a hunch is a rotation of waist, which carries the whole upper body while the legs stay put; infant head proportions are a relative scale on head. That is what keeps every part of the body where it belongs at every size.

The head multiplier is deliberately small — 1.15× at Infant, tapering to 1.00× by adulthood. A Minecraft head is already a quarter of the model's height, so anything bolder stops reading as a child and starts reading as a bobblehead.

03 — The readoutNothing runs invisibly

Every number the pack is using sits above your hotbar, in two lines. There is no hidden state: if it is affecting you, you can see it.

Alongside that, anything that used to happen quietly now says so. Status effects show their particles — stage buffs included — so a Slowness you did not ask for is visible rather than mysterious. You are told the moment you catch an illness and roughly how long until symptoms, not just when symptoms arrive. When contagion jumps between players, both ends are named and both puff. Your health ceiling announces itself whenever it moves.

04 — Who you areThe choice at birth

Asked once, before the life starts. The differences are demographic rather than dramatic — nobody is stronger or weaker for it.

An operator can change it afterwards with /scriptevent lifespan:sex female; a player cannot change their own once the life has started.

05 — IllnessThirteen ways to be unwell

Illnesses incubate before symptoms show, spread to anyone standing within seven blocks, and grant lasting immunity once you survive them. Three of them never go away.

06 — InjuryWhat a bad landing costs

Damage is not just hearts any more. The very young and the over-sixties break roughly twice as easily as everyone else.

07 — FamilyA partner who actually helps

Marry a villager, and they stop being a villager. They follow you, fight for you, carry things back to you and patch you up.

1. Marry. Craft a wedding ring and use it on any villager, once you are 15 or older. The villager becomes your partner — named, permanent and bonded to you.
2. They help. Your partner follows you, attacks anything that attacks you, picks items up off the ground and hands them over, tends your wounds when you drop below half health, and occasionally brings you a meal. They cannot be hurt by you.
3. Try for a child. Use a cradle with your partner within ten blocks. It needs decent condition, no active illness, and roughly a year since your last child. Fertility falls off sharply with age — and faster for whoever carries.
4. Wait. Gestation runs about nine months of game time. Whoever carries feels the slowness; the other just gets told when it is close.
5. Raise them. Newborns are vanilla baby villagers, at exactly vanilla size, and grow: child at 5, adolescent at 12, grown at 18. From adolescence they fight alongside you; grown children fetch and fight like a partner does. Their name tag shows their age.
6. Send them to school. From 5 to 16 a child goes to the town school each morning and comes home at dusk. Every full day is a term; six terms earns a level of schooling, up to a professional degree, and what they earn they keep into adulthood. Their progress shows against their name in the ledger.

What they look like

Your partner is the villager you married, visually unchanged: same model, same profession outfit, same biome clothing. The pack reads the villager's profession and biome before the wedding and puts them straight back on, so a snowy-biome librarian stays a snowy-biome librarian — only the behaviour changes. Newborns render as vanilla baby villagers, the real baby model, and grow into the adult one. Nothing here uses a custom skin.

08 — TownsEvery village is a finished town. Growing one takes two people.

A village you find in the world already has one of everything — twelve civic buildings and four kinds of home, staffed and open. Nothing is missing. So building is never about filling a gap: it is about a second hospital, another row of housing, a town outgrowing the one street it started on. And it takes two jobs, because neither one can do the whole thing.

You start in one

A pack about living in a town should not open with you alone in a wood, so a new life begins in one. On first spawn the pack looks for a real village within reach and develops that; if there is nothing there, it founds a town on the spot — bell, villagers and all — and sets you down in the finished thing.

The order matters. The town is raised first and you are only moved into it once the last block is placed, so nobody watches their birthplace go up around them. Your spawn point is set to the town square, so dying puts you back among people rather than back in the wild. If there is genuinely nowhere flat and dry within about ninety blocks — a mushroom island, mid-ocean — you stay where you landed, which is the honest answer rather than a town half-sunk in the sea.

And the ones you find later

Walk in and there is nothing to watch. No announcement, no title card, no buildings rising out of the ground in front of you. Every counter has somebody behind it and the starter houses have price tags on them. As far as the world is concerned the town has always been that way.

The buildings sit in rings around the village bell rather than along one street, with more plots the further out you go so the density stays even, each ring staggered half a step so nothing lines up spoke to spoke. Every door faces the green, and a track runs from each doorstep back toward the middle — stopping well short of it, so the original village's own paths and crops are left alone rather than paved over. A single street reads as a film set; this reads as somewhere people live.

What every village comes with

The two halves of a building

A town only grows when a solicitor and a builder both do their half, and neither can do the other's. That split is the whole mechanic:

The site is the progress bar. Every couple of seconds the blocks actually standing there are counted against the blueprint, and the action bar shows the percentage, how many blocks are left and a bearing to the nearest gap — 4 east, 2 up. Nothing is stored: knock a finished wall down and the job goes back to being unfinished, because the only record of how far along the work is, is the work.

A small house is an afternoon: 379 blocks in three materials, and 282⬥ at the end of it — near five days of a builder's wage. A block of flats is 1,668 blocks over twelve storeys' worth of height and pays more than double. The solicitor's side is quieter and steadier: pay the site fee, watch somebody else raise it, take the development fee when they sign off, and clear a little under two hundred emeralds a building on top of the best wage in town.

Built like the village they grew out of

Bedrock generates villages in five styles, and a town built onto one should be made of what that village is made of. A stone-and-plaster hall in a desert village looks dropped there; the same hall in cut sandstone looks like the village grew.

So the style is read off the village itself. Every blueprint asks for roles — the wall block, the roof stair, the post — and each village supplies its own answers. Civic halls take the masonry treatment and houses take the timber one, which is what gives a single village a mix of plank cottages and stone halls rather than sixteen of the same building.

A desert village has no timber at all, so its rails, torch posts and school benches are sandstone walls rather than fences — the palette carries that difference through every fitting rather than substituting oak into a sandstone town.

How they are built

Every building is a plinth of the local stone, walls between exposed posts, a beamed ceiling and a pitched roof of stairs with solid gable ends that oversail the walls by a block. Stairs and logs are used freely because any state is a valid state for them — a stair always places, whichever way round it is. Beds go in with an explicit direction. Nothing that needs a wall behind it is used at all: no ladders, no wall torches, no signs, no banners, because those pop off and drop as an item, and an item on the floor is a hole where a fitting should be.

Corner survey posts are deliberately set one block outside the footprint, so a builder never has to demolish the survey before starting on the building. There is no step up into a doorway either: the street and the floor sit at the same level, so the stair that used to stand outside every front door climbed to exactly where you already were and did nothing but get in the way. It is a flush paved threshold now. Each block id is checked against the running game once and falls back to something that certainly exists, so a renamed block leaves a solid wall rather than a gap.

09 — Making a livingMoney, work and schooling

Emeralds are the currency. The bank holds a balance; a purchase takes from the balance first and makes up any shortfall from the emeralds in your pockets, so you are never stuck holding money you cannot spend.

Work

A job is work, not attendance. Turning up used to be the whole of it — stand within a few blocks of your workplace and the shift banked itself, so a full wage was what you got for leaving the game running in the right spot.

Every job has a duty, and the duty is what that trade actually does. It can be any of five things — using a block, breaking one, talking to somebody, defeating something, or using a medicine on a patient — so a job is no longer a matter of finding the right cabinet to open.

An officer catches thieves. A firefighter puts fires out. A doctor treats the sick. A teacher teaches children. A shop assistant and a banker serve customers. A stablehand handles the animals. A baker harvests the crop as well as firing the ovens. Those three whose work is wherever the trouble is — the officer, the firefighter and the doctor — count anywhere inside the town rather than only at their own building.

Some work is worth more than other work. An ore is worth three shovels of gravel to a miner, a thief in the cells is worth four petty offences to an officer, a child taught is worth three to a teacher, and a fire beaten out is worth four buckets checked. The action bar shows the multiplier as it lands.

Sixteen pieces of work is a full day's wage. Each one banks a sixteenth of a shift, there is a second's cooldown so you cannot earn a day by hammering one barrel, and the day's pay is the fraction you actually did — eight pieces, half a wage. Stand in your workplace doing nothing and you earn nothing, it counts as a missed shift, and four of those running and you are let go.

The action bar keeps you told either way: a prompt naming the duty and your count while you are at work and idle, and a tick with the running total each time a piece of work lands. The jobs board lists the duty rather than a blurb, because a wage paid for work should say what the work is before you sign up to it.

10 — Property and the lawA door of your own, and what happens without one

Apartments are a block of six flats sold separately, which is what makes them the way into the housing market. Every home comes with a bed, a chest and somewhere to craft; the large house has two beds and a study. Civic buildings are public — only homes are private.

Crime

Walking into a house you have not bought is trespassing, and so is hitting anyone who lives in the town. Each offence adds to a wanted level, and once you are wanted the station sends officers after you.

Thieves

A police officer whose work is opening a filing cabinet is not a police officer, so towns have somebody to catch.

After dark, thieves turn up at the edge of town and make for whoever is carrying money. One that reaches you goes through your pockets and takes 4% of your balance, up to ninety emeralds, then runs. They do no damage — the loss is the money — and no more than three are out at once. They are gone by morning.

Anyone can drive one off, and whoever does gets back whatever that thief was carrying. An officer on duty also collects a 26⬥ bounty, and it counts as four pieces of work, because catching them is the job rather than a distraction from it. Turn them off with Thieves after dark if you would rather your nights were quiet.

An officer who reaches you fines you 45⬥ per point and clears your record. If you cannot pay, you are taken to the town prison — not a back room of the station, but a building of its own with four cells behind bars either side of a warder's aisle — for about a minute per point, and teleported back into the cell if you wander off. When the time is up you are let out at the prison gate rather than left standing behind the bars you have just finished serving your time behind. Officers never hurt you — their attack damage is set to zero deliberately, and a check asserts it. Leave town and the heat dies down on its own, or hand yourself in at the station and pay the fine before they find you. The warder has nothing to sell — his counter is there to tell you how long you have left.

11 — DyingThe ordinary kind, and the other kind

12 — The medicine chestNine things to craft

13 — Running the worldSettings and commands

Everything is adjustable in game. Operators get a World Settings page inside the Life Ledger; the same things are reachable by command.

Pacing

The default is one year per Minecraft day — about eighty Minecraft days, or thirteen hours of play, for a full life. A childhood is then something you live through rather than something you watch go past. Children age off exactly the same number, so a parent and their child never drift apart on different clocks. Turn the rate up in World Settings if you would rather move faster; changing it mid-world is safe, because everyone's stored age is rescaled so nobody suddenly turns ninety.

What you can switch off

Diseases, injuries, family, permadeath, gravestones, the estate transfer, per-stage scale and posture, contagion between players, effect particles, the hotbar readout, and — new in this version, and previously claimed here without being true — towns, developing a village you walk into, beginning every life in a town, and the police. Each independently, plus a reset to defaults. With permadeath off, the end of a life starts a new generation instead of locking you out.

14 — Honest notesWhere the seams are

Bedrock gives no way to resize a player's collision box, so an infant looks tiny but still occupies an adult-sized hitbox, and the camera stays at adult eye height. The scaling is done by animating every bone of the player model about the feet, which is the closest the platform allows.

To register the stage animations, the resource pack ships its own copy of entity/player.entity.json, built from the current vanilla file. It will not conflict with packs that only add textures or skins, but it will conflict with another pack that replaces the same file — load Life in Minecraft above it, or expect one of the two to lose its animations. After a major Minecraft update, this is the file most likely to need refreshing.

The six-food-group nutrition system is gone: no diet score, no malnutrition, no tracking of what you last ate. Vitality — the general condition figure that drives your health ceiling, your resistance to illness and your fertility — now recovers on its own when nothing is wrong with you, drains while you are ill or injured, drains faster past 55, and climbs fastest in bed. Food itself still matters in one way: rotten flesh, spider eyes and raw meat can still give you food poisoning or dysentery, because those are illnesses rather than bookkeeping.

Built against the stable scripting API (@minecraft/server 2.x) with a minimum engine of 1.21.80, so it runs on anything from that release onwards, current versions included. No experimental toggles.

Worldgen is untouched. Bedrock exposes no hook into village generation, so nothing here changes how villages are made. A town is surveyed and constructed onto an existing village — all sixteen buildings of it, but silently, and while you are still too far out to read anything, so what you walk into is a town that was already there. Anything added afterwards is a solicitor commissioning it and a builder raising it by hand, and that you very much do watch.

The cart is the least verifiable part. A rideable, player-steered vehicle depends on the engine honouring rideable, input_ground_controlled and controlled_by_player together. The model, the seats and the ownership are all checked; how it actually handles under your hands is the one thing a simulation cannot tell me.

Officers target players generally. They are only ever dispatched while somebody nearby is wanted and are removed as soon as the record is clear, but on a busy server an officer walking to a suspect may briefly path toward whoever is closest.

Cargo in the cart may not open. The cart carries a fifteen-slot inventory, but whether Bedrock surfaces a container screen for a custom rideable is version-dependent.

Everything is per-player and works on a server or Realm. Contagion is the one system that crosses between people: stand near someone with the plague and you will very likely take it home. Children and partners belong to whoever married or conceived them.

Item icons. Every item declared its icon as {"texture": …}, which the current docs mark deprecated — it renders nothing, in the inventory and in your hand alike. All nine now use the current {"textures": {"default": …}} schema.

Geometry. The old custom family models carried a hat bone drawn over a region of the texture nothing painted — a bone that rendered literally nothing. Those models are gone entirely now that the family renders as villagers, and a check walks every remaining cube to confirm its texture footprint is not blank.

Family. Partners and children carried a despawn rule contradicting their persistence, so one left more than 128 blocks away was quietly deleted. That rule is gone.

Estates. Gravestone inventories were private, which in Bedrock means contents are never dropped — breaking a grave destroyed everything inside with no trace. They spill now.

Fittings that fall off. Rebuilding the towns in a medieval style put torches, lanterns, campfires, beds and carpets in every room — and a torch with air beneath it, or a lantern with air above it, pops off the moment it is placed and drops as an item. Twenty-eight torches were doing exactly that. Every interior torch now comes with the post that holds it up, and the attic lantern that hung from a sloping roof stands on the boards instead.

Ids that do not exist. Bedrock spells the stonecutter minecraft:stonecutter_block; minecraft:stonecutter is a different, long-removed block, so four of them resolved to nothing. Every id the blueprints can actually place is now checked against a list of ids confirmed to exist.

Both are now guarded by a sweep of all sixteen buildings in both facings — 60,824 placements — that flattens each blueprint to what would really be in the world and checks every one for a real id, a state its own kind of block accepts, and something to hold it up.

The first version of the stage animations was built on the belief that geometry.humanoid.custom is a flat rig — every bone parentless, each one needing its own scale and its own compensating translation to stay anchored to the ground. That belief came from an old copy of the model and it was simply wrong.

The real rig is nested: root at the feet holds waist at the hips, which holds body, which holds the head and both arms; the legs hang off root, and hat, sleeves, pants and jacket hang off the parts they cover. Scaling every bone separately meant children were scaled twice over — a sleeve got its parent's 0.46 and then its own, landing at 0.21 — and every compensating translation compounded down the chain. At infant size the torso was thrown well clear of the legs, which is exactly what it looked like.

Rebuilt on the real hierarchy, the whole thing collapses to a handful of rotations and two scales, with no translation to get wrong: root for size, waist for the hunch, head for infant proportions, and the four limbs for pose. Layer bones are never touched, because they already follow what they cover. The validator now encodes the hierarchy and fails the build if any animation reintroduces a position offset, scales a bone through its parent, or touches a layer bone.

The villager client entity scales babies with query.is_baby ? 2.0 : 0.9375, and vanilla's own baby component group sets minecraft:scale to 0.5 to cancel that multiplier out. Ours set 1.0, so every newborn rendered at twice the size of a real baby villager — and because the baby model already has a large head by design, doubling it is the part you notice first. The newborn now uses 0.5 with a collision box to match, so it is exactly a vanilla baby villager. A check asserts that number so it cannot drift back.

The player's own infant head came down separately, from 1.5× to 1.15×, for the same reason: the number that looks modest in a table does not look modest on a model whose head is already a quarter of its height.

Rather than shipping custom models and skins, the partner and child entities carry a copy of the current vanilla villager_v2 client definition — the same geometry, the same forty-odd profession and biome textures, the same render controllers, the same geometry.villager.baby. Profession is read-only from script, so each of the fifteen professions and seven biomes has a component group the script triggers on the wedding day. The upshot is that a partner is pixel-for-pixel the villager you married, and this pack ships exactly one entity texture of its own: the gravestone.

Every simulation runs on seeded dice. The pack rolls for illness, injury and contagion, so a suite leaning on real randomness passes most of the time and fails occasionally — and an occasional failure is one nobody can reproduce or trust. One such flake turned up and could not be reproduced in thirty runs, so the generator is now seeded: the same six lives, the same illnesses, every time, and any future failure can be replayed exactly.

The pack runs against a simulated Minecraft API with a real block grid, so a town is genuinely surveyed and built in the test — 392,000 blocks written — then bought into, worked in, commissioned, hand-built block by block, trespassed in and arrested in. Every one of the seventeen buildings is recorded, built for real in both facings and compared cell for cell, because a materials list that disagrees with the blueprint is a contract nobody can finish. That is 233 behavioural checks across three simulations — including a synthesised village of each of the five types, which the detector has to name correctly — plus 114 that sweep every block of every building in every village style and both facings for a real id, a valid state and something to hold it up, 584 static checks over every identifier, texture, recipe, icon schema, manifest version, interact component, profession event, body proportion, cart bone and the player rig's own invariants, and 31 that no cube in any model is painted onto empty texture.

Two real bugs fell out of writing those tests. Officers were defined with an attack damage of 0, but the code that attached the component used a plain truthiness test — so the zero was skipped and officers would have used the engine's default melee damage on you. And wages were gated on a pay-day counter tested for truthiness, which meant that on day zero of a brand-new world — the only day whose number is 0 — nobody would ever have been paid.

Worth knowing how that simulation was corrected: the first version of it never regenerated health, so simulated characters died over a hundred times per life and the balance readings taken from it were meaningless. With vanilla regeneration and respawn modelled, a well-fed character now dies once, of old age, somewhere in their late seventies to early hundreds. What still cannot be tested here is the game itself: how the poses read in motion, and how the scaling looks on your own skin.