Better Difficulty

BetterDifficulty

BetterDifficulty makes Minecraft harder in a structured, progressive way. Instead of just cranking up the vanilla difficulty slider, it introduces a three-tier Game Stage system that scales the world's danger over time — and rewards you for it.

⚔️ Game Stages

The world progresses through three stages: Normal → Expert → Master.

Stages advance automatically when you reach key milestones — entering the Nether pushes the world to Expert, slaying the Ender Dragon unlocks Master. Alternatively, server operators can set the stage manually at any time with /betterdifficulty stage set <normal|expert|master>. All progress is saved and persists across restarts.

Per-player stages are also supported for servers that want individual difficulty scaling.

👾 Difficulty Features

Over 21 toggleable gameplay features activate and scale with your current stage. Every feature can be individually enabled or disabled in the config.

Mob behaviour

• Mobs spawn with bonus HP, damage and speed on Expert and Master
• Creepers can spawn charged, chain-react on death, explode through walls, and are immune to their own blasts
• Endermen teleport aggressively toward nearby players and deal direct damage
• Zombies and Skeletons have a chance to spawn riding a chicken
• Pillagers carry functional firework rockets that home in on players
• Evokers spawn with a Totem of Undying in their off-hand
• Drowned summon a lightning bolt on death
• Mob groups and spawn rate pressure increase at higher stages

World

• Double loot drops (30% on Expert, 55% on Master)
• Experience bonus (+25% / +50%)
• Deadlier explosions deal extra direct damage to players
• Monster hits apply Weakness and Slowness
• Spawn blocker keeps monsters away from the world spawn
• Killer Bunny can rarely replace a normal rabbit spawn
• A zombie wearing your gear spawns when you die

🔴 Blood Moon

On any given night, a Blood Moon has a ~6.7% chance of rising. When it does:

• Hostile mob spawn pressure on the surface doubles
• Players cannot sleep until dawn
• The sky, fog, and lighting shift to a deep crimson — visible on all clients in real time with smooth interpolation
• Special mob variants spawn: armoured zombies and Power V skeletons by default, fully configurable via SNBT tags in the config
• The event is announced server-wide in red text and ends automatically at dawn

The Blood Moon can also be forced or stopped at any time via /betterdifficulty bloodmoon force|stop. All state — including whether a Blood Moon already rolled tonight — persists across server restarts.

🎒 Treasure Bags

Defeating powerful bosses and completing world milestones rewards players with Treasure Bags — special loot containers that also track your collection progress.

Each bag has its own drop table — defined by JSON config files that generate automatically on first run. You can fully customise the item pool, weights, chances and stack sizes without touching any code. Hot-reloading the config with /betterdifficulty treasurebag reload applies changes without a restart.

Opening bags tracks which items you've unlocked in a Pokédex-style progress system, shown as a tooltip on the item itself. Progress syncs to the client and persists per player across sessions.

⚙️ Configuration

All features are controlled through a single config file. Key options include:

• Enable or disable any of the 21 difficulty features individually
• Blood Moon: chance per night, surface-only spawns, sleep prevention, visual intensity, custom special spawn rules
• Treasure Bags: fishing requirement, tooltip visibility, fully custom drop tables per bag type

🖥️ Commands (permission level 2)

/betterdifficulty stage get|set <normal|expert|master>
/betterdifficulty bloodmoon force|stop
/betterdifficulty treasurebag reload

Inspired by the classic Bloodmoon and Majrusz's Progressive Difficulty.