Cozy Core makes your home a slow, peaceful, cute place to come back to.
Light a Hearth Lantern and the ground around it becomes home, and home starts looking after itself. At sunset the candles light up one by one. At night your cat comes home and curls up by the lantern. Every so often a new flower turns up in the garden, and some evenings a stray cat wanders up to your door.
Home is safe, too. A creeper blows up beside your house and not a block breaks. No monsters spawn in the yard, fire can't creep into the walls, and endermen leave your roof alone. Out in the wild, Minecraft is as it always was.
Cozy Core also takes the grind out of decorating: one plank in the stonecutter makes stairs, a fence or a door. It's for Minecraft 26.3 and 1.21.1, on Fabric (with Fabric API) or NeoForge, with nothing new to learn and nothing running in the background.
Light a hearth
The Hearth Lantern. Make it from a lantern and four amethyst shards. Everything within 64 blocks of it, at any height, is home: room for a garden, a barn and a pond. There are six to choose from: the classic one, a soul one, and a copper one in each of copper's four colours (they never weather). On 1.21.1 there are the classic and soul ones, since copper lanterns came in a later version of Minecraft.
Home comes alive. Home does a few gentle things on its own:
- Lights at dusk. Candles at home light themselves one by one after sunset and go out in the early morning. A candle you light during the day stays lit.
- Pets come home. At night, while you're home, your tamed cats and dogs settle by the nearest Hearth Lantern; cats curl up. In the morning they follow you again. Pets told to sit stay where they are.
- A garden that grows. Now and then a flower that suits the biome grows on open grass at home, never more than a few in one patch, so over the days the garden fills in a little.
- A visitor at your door. Now and then in the evening, a stray cat walks up to your Hearth Lantern and curls up beside it. Where rabbits or foxes live, it's sometimes one of them instead. It leaves in the morning, unless you tame it, put it on a lead or name it; then it's yours and stays.
Home is safe. Inside a Hearth Lantern's reach:
- no monster spawns naturally and phantoms don't come for you (spawners and raids work as usual);
- creeper and ghast explosions still hurt, but break no blocks, so a blast at the edge leaves a crater that stops where home begins;
- fire still burns and goes out, but doesn't spread or burn blocks away;
- endermen leave your blocks alone;
- blasts, fire and lightning don't hurt your animals, pets or villagers, and lightning doesn't turn a villager into a witch;
- you and your tamed pets take no fall damage, so a slip off the roof doesn't cost a trip back;
- things you drop last an hour instead of five minutes;
- glass, panes, ice and bookshelves drop themselves when you break them, as with Silk Touch.
Welcome home. Walking in shows "Home" above your hotbar, with a soft fireplace crackle. Rename a lantern on an anvil ("Willow Cottage") and you'll see that name instead. While you hold a Hearth Lantern, small flames on the ground show where home ends.
Build with less grind
Wood in the stonecutter. One plank makes one set of stairs, a fence, a gate, a door, a trapdoor, a button, a pressure plate or a sign, or two slabs. A log makes four times as much. Logs also cut into wood and stripped wood, and bamboo works too.
Slabs back into planks. Two wooden slabs make one plank again.
Re-dyeing. Eight blocks of terracotta, stained glass, glass panes, concrete powder or candles around a dye, in any colours, make eight of the dye's colour.
A few hard-to-find blocks to craft:
| Recipe | Makes |
|---|---|
| Six sticks in two columns with a string between them at the top | 3 scaffolding |
| Eight sand around a red dye | 8 red sand |
| A vine and a glow ink sac | 4 glow lichen |
| Any leaves and bone meal | A moss block |
Traders with building blocks. The wandering trader can sell azaleas, fungus and calcite. Masons sell tuff, mud bricks, calcite and packed mud.
Also in Cozy Core
Keep your hotbar when you die. Your hotbar, armour and off-hand stay with you. Everything else drops where you fell (into a grave, with a graves mod), so there's still a trip back.
A Cozy Core advancements tab that opens when you pick up planks, with seven steps along the way. One of them is "Safe and sound": a creeper explodes at home, and nothing breaks.
New recipes show up in your recipe book as you pick up what they need.
Changing the rules
Each rule is an ordinary game rule: it shows in the Game Rules screen when you make a world, and /gamerule changes it any time.
| Game rule | New worlds |
|---|---|
cozy_core:hearths_protect_builds |
true (blasts, fire and endermen spare blocks at home) |
cozy_core:hearth_lantern_radius |
64 (how far home reaches; 0 switches lanterns off) |
cozy_core:hearth_item_minutes |
60 (how long dropped items last at home; 5 is the usual five minutes) |
cozy_core:hearth_lights |
true (candles at home light after sunset and go out in the early morning) |
cozy_core:hearth_garden |
true (now and then a flower grows on open grass at home) |
cozy_core:pets_come_home |
true (at night, your cats and dogs settle by the hearth while you're home) |
cozy_core:hearth_visitors |
true (now and then in the evening, a stray cat, rabbit or fox visits your Hearth Lantern) |
cozy_core:keep_hotbar_on_death |
true |
cozy_core:mob_explosions_break_blocks |
true (false: explosions break nothing anywhere) |
cozy_core:endermen_take_blocks |
true (false: endermen take nothing anywhere) |
cozy_core:fire_burns_blocks |
true (false: fire burns nothing anywhere) |
Want the whole world kept safe? Turn the last three off. Worlds you already have keep the settings they were made with: a world made before 0.7.0 keeps a reach of 32, and /gamerule cozy_core:hearth_lantern_radius 64 changes it.
Other mods
Wood from Biomes O' Plenty, Ecologics, Promenade and Wilder Wild works in the stonecutter like vanilla wood. Pieces from Beautify and Macaw's Roofs, Fences and Walls, Stairs, Windows, Furniture, Doors and Trapdoors go in too, when they're made of a single wood. Small pieces cost one plank; big ones, like desks and big gates, cost a log. Anything with glass, iron or paper stays at the crafting table. These recipes only switch on when that mod is installed.
About this mod
I made this for my own cozy building worlds and am sharing it in case it suits yours. I built it with help from Claude, an AI assistant. The code is on GitHub under the MIT License, so you're welcome to read it, fork it or include it in a modpack.
Playing without mods? The recipes are also available as a plain data pack on each GitHub release.
Found a bug or have an idea? Tell me on GitHub.
More of my mods, in short videos: youtube.com/@gabmaybelle

