Brutally Realistic 1.5.0 — Finding the Way

Minecraft 26.2, NeoForge and Fabric. Existing worlds are fine.

Leaving camp is now a real risk, and finding your way back is a skill. You no longer know where you are: you read the sun, leave marks, draw maps and, later, follow a needle.

No more coordinates

• The debug screen (F3) no longer shows your position, the direction you face or the biome, for every player.
• Server owners can turn this off: navigation.hide_coordinates.
• The vanilla empty map (it showed a "you are here" arrow) no longer has a recipe: the hide map replaces it.

Read the sun

• Gnomon: a straight stick planted in a ring of stones (2 sticks and a cobblestone). In the sun it casts a real shadow on the ground that turns with the hours and changes length: long in the morning, shortest at midday, long again in the evening. At midday the shadow points north.
• Right-click it to know whether the shadow is getting shorter, is at its shortest, or is getting longer. Working out north is up to you.
• The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. How high it climbs depends on the season and on the world's latitude (navigation.latitude, 45° north by default). No shadow at night, in the rain, or without open sky.

Mark the way

• Cairn: three stacked stones (3 cobblestone), visible from afar.
• Trail blaze: right-click the side of a trunk with a knife to strip a patch of bark. The pale wood stands out in the forest. The mark falls with the trunk.

Draw the land

• Hide map: a tanned hide and a piece of charcoal. Open it where you stand. It draws the land you walk through while you hold it, but never shows where you are: you have to recognize the river, the coast or the cairn you left.

True north

• The compass now points north, like a real magnetized needle, and no longer to the world spawn. In the Nether and the End it still spins; a compass linked to a lodestone and the recovery compass work as before.
• New compass recipe: four iron nuggets around a lodestone shard, sometimes found when mining iron ore.

Survival Journal

• New chapter Far from Camp: read the sun, mark the way, draw the land, the needle. As always, it says what to look for, never the recipe.
• New advancement tab Finding the Way: High Noon, Marking the Way, Cartographer, True North.