Powered Mobs — Full Changelog

v2.2.0 — Adaptive Difficulty & Mod Compatibility Update

Dynamic Difficulty System

• Reintroduced the persistent 0–250 difficulty progression system as a separate layer from adaptive player-power scaling.

• Difficulty now increases naturally through gameplay:

  • Common hostile kill: +0.35

  • Elite kill: +1

  • Boss kill: +6

  • Apothic Invader kill: +10

  • Player death: -5

• Hellmarked progression is tier-aware:

  • Elite: +1

  • Ultra: +2

  • Infernal: +4

• Added environmental difficulty contributions:

  • Depth: up to +30

  • Distance from world spawn: up to +35

  • Nether: +25

  • End: +40

• Difficulty now uses the full 0–250 range instead of reaching its effective cap too early.

High-Difficulty Scaling

At difficulty 250, the default additional scaling can reach approximately:

• Common mobs:

  • x2.50 damage

  • x2.00 health

• Elites:

  • x2.25 damage

  • x2.30 health

• Bosses:

  • x1.75 damage

  • x2.50 health

• Apothic Invaders:

  • Damage increase heavily restricted

  • x2.50 health

Difficulty scaling is intentionally aggressive at high values. Difficulty 200–250 is intended for powerful modded/endgame builds rather than vanilla-tier equipment.

Intrinsic Threat Protection

• Added threat-aware damage scaling.

• Mobs that already deal extremely high damage receive significantly less additional damage scaling.

• Low-damage enemies such as Zombies can benefit from most of the difficulty multiplier.

• Naturally lethal enemies such as Wardens and heavily modified bosses are prevented from receiving equally extreme multipliers.

• Prevents already-dangerous attacks from becoming unavoidable one-shots while still allowing difficulty to matter.

Apotheosis Integration

• Added native detection for current Apotheosis 1.21.x markers:

  • apoth.boss

  • apoth.miniboss

• Legacy Apotheosis markers remain supported.

• Apothic Invaders use a heavily reduced adaptive damage factor.

• Apothic Elites use their own dedicated adaptive factor.

• Invaders receive most of their additional difficulty through:

  • Health

  • Resistance

  • Burst survivability

• Attacks that already kill an endgame player in roughly 2–3 hits are intentionally prevented from being multiplied like normal mob attacks.

• Added additional protection for damage types that bypass conventional armor.

Hellmarked Integration

• Improved tier-aware scaling.

• Hellmarked Elite, Ultra and Infernal mobs are no longer treated identically.

• Ultra mobs receive approximately x1.15 of Powered Mobs' added HP/armor contribution.

• Infernal mobs receive approximately x1.30.

• Hellmarked's own scaling remains respected to avoid excessive double-scaling.

Universal Hostile Detection

Powered Mobs now detects hostiles through multiple independent methods:

• Enemy

• MobCategory.MONSTER

• c:bosses

• Apotheosis markers

• Hellmarked

• Real aggression fallback

If a modded living entity actually damages a player, Powered Mobs can mark and scale it even if the originating mod incorrectly classified the entity.

• Projectile owners are resolved when possible.

• Modded projectile attacks can correctly attribute their attacker.

• Tamed pet kills can contribute progression to their owner.

Spawner Handling

• Spawner mobs are still scaled by Powered Mobs.

• Spawner kills do not increase player difficulty.

• Prevents mob farms from being used to artificially reach difficulty 250.

• Spawn eggs and summoned mobs are no longer incorrectly classified as spawner mobs.

Offensive Power Tracking Improvements

• Offensive power now expires correctly when the combat observation window ends.

• Equipping a very strong weapon once no longer permanently locks the player's profile to that weapon's power level.

• Historical power remains partially preserved to prevent gear-removal exploits.

• DPS is now measured primarily per target.

• AoE attacks no longer multiply perceived single-target DPS simply because they hit many entities simultaneously.

• Burst power continues to use high-percentile hit measurements instead of relying only on the largest hit ever recorded.

Defensive Power Tracking Improvements

• Defensive measurements now use robust recent samples.

• Armor-bypassing damage is excluded from conventional armor-efficiency learning.

• True/penetrating damage no longer incorrectly teaches Powered Mobs that strong armor provides no protection.

• Zero-health-damage defensive events can still contribute to extreme mitigation detection.

• Extremely powerful mitigation is capped internally to prevent runaway scaling.

Modded Health Compatibility

• Mob health scaling now uses total attribute multiplication instead of assuming vanilla base health.

• Health granted by other mods and attribute modifiers is respected.

• Important for:

  • Apotheosis bosses

  • Hellmarked mobs

  • Modded bosses

  • Enemies with dynamically modified max health

• Rescaling remains anti-accumulative.

Special Defensive Systems

• Energy shields and full-damage absorption systems are intentionally preserved as powerful endgame rewards.

• Powered Mobs does not artificially bypass MekaSuit, Draconic-style shields, or similar systems.

• Instead, moderately increased incoming raw damage can increase pressure on their energy/shield resources.

• These systems remain substantially stronger than conventional armor, as intended by their progression cost.

Rupture & Burst

• Rupture continues to convert part of excessively large burst damage into follow-up vulnerability.

• Stronger weapons always remain stronger.

• No universal hard damage cap.

• Common mobs can still legitimately become one-shots during late-game progression.

• Elites and bosses receive controlled burst compression.

• Rupture rewards continued pressure after breaking an enemy's defenses.

Commands

Added direct difficulty administration:

• /poweredmobs difficulty get

• /poweredmobs difficulty set <value>

• /poweredmobs difficulty add <value>

Useful for testing difficulty levels such as 0, 100, 200 and 250 without manually farming progression.

Major difficulty, Apotheosis and Hellmarked settings can also be adjusted through /poweredmobs set.

v2.1.0 — Endgame Defense Calibration

Unobtainium-Calibrated Defense Model

• Reworked defensive scaling around realistic modded endgame armor.

• Unobtainium-level conventional defense is used as the intended upper reference for normal armor progression.

• Extreme energy/shield systems remain a separate category.

Health and Mitigation Separation

Defense is no longer represented by a single combined number.

Powered Mobs now separates:

• Health Power

  • Derived from maximum health.

  • Deliberately receives low compensation so extra hearts remain highly valuable.

• Mitigation Power

  • Derived from actual observed damage reduction.

  • Uses a saturating curve rather than infinitely increasing mob damage.

• Intrinsic Threat

  • Evaluates how dangerous the attack already is before additional scaling.

Extra Health Remains Valuable

• Maximum-health scaling was made deliberately conservative.

• Quadrupling player health no longer causes mobs to quadruple their damage.

• Players with large health investments retain a major survivability advantage.

Saturating Armor Curve

• Conventional armor receives meaningful compensation at early/mid tiers.

• Diamond armor no longer makes normal hostile mobs irrelevant too early.

• Scaling progressively flattens at high defense levels.

• Allthemodium, Vibranium and Unobtainium do not create an endless armor-vs-damage escalation loop.

Threat-Aware Damage

• Small attacks receive much more adaptive scaling.

• Attacks already capable of removing a large percentage of baseline player health receive much less.

• Greatly improves compatibility with extremely hard-hitting modded mobs.

Special Armor Compatibility

• Increased maximum measurable mitigation.

• Full absorption/zero-health-damage events can now contribute defensive information.

• Shield-blocked hits are handled separately.

• MekaSuit, Draconic-style shields and other resource-based defenses are not intentionally pierced.

v2.0.0 — Adaptive Power Scaling Rewrite

Complete Scaling Core Rewrite

• Removed the old system primarily based on historical server-wide average player health.

• Added persistent per-player power profiles stored by UUID.

• Player progression is now measured from actual combat instead of depending on specific mod integrations.

Universal Offensive Power Detection

Powered Mobs observes real player attacks and estimates:

• Recent DPS

• High-percentile hit damage

• Burst potential

This allows compatibility with weapons from virtually any mod without needing to know the item's registry name.

Examples include:

• Silent Gear

• Apotheosis

• Ars Nouveau

• Spell mods

• Projectile weapons

• Custom modded weapons

Universal Defensive Power Detection

• Defense is learned from actual incoming damage.

• Powered Mobs compares damage before conventional mitigation with the damage that ultimately reaches the player.

• Naturally accounts for:

  • Armor

  • Armor toughness

  • Enchantments

  • Resistance effects

  • Absorption

  • Many modded defensive mechanics

Partial Compensation Philosophy

Powered Mobs no longer attempts to match player progression 1:1.

If a player becomes several times stronger, mobs recover only part of that advantage.

This means:

• New gear still feels powerful.

• Expensive weapons still kill faster.

• Better armor still lets the player survive longer.

• The world does not immediately become irrelevant.

Slow Adaptation

• Player power does not instantly jump when new equipment is obtained.

• Adaptation uses configurable rise/fall rates.

• Newly crafted equipment gets a period where it feels exceptionally powerful before mobs gradually adapt.

• Personal historical power prevents simple gear-removal exploits.

• A disconnected veteran no longer scales enemies for a new player.

Local Multiplayer Scaling

• Mobs use nearby players rather than the entire server.

• Separate horizontal and vertical search radii.

• Local power combines group average and strongest nearby player.

• Mob scaling is snapshotted when the mob is processed.

• No constant every-tick health recalculation.

Sublinear Health Scaling

Different mob categories received independent curves:

• Weak mobs: light scaling

• Common mobs: moderate scaling

• Elites/Infernal mobs: stronger scaling

• Bosses: strongest scaling, but still sublinear

Common mobs are intentionally allowed to become one-shots with sufficiently advanced weapons.

Mob Damage Scaling

• Mob damage is modified before player armor mitigation.

• Armor therefore continues to function normally.

• Increased player defense only receives partial compensation.

• Bosses and naturally powerful mobs receive reduced damage scaling.

New Burst & Rupture System

• Removed universal anti-one-shot behavior from normal mobs.

• Added controlled burst handling primarily for elites and bosses.

• Oversized hits are compressed using a soft curve rather than a flat hard cap.

• The compressed portion generates Rupture.

• Rupture increases damage from subsequent attacks and consumes stacks.

• Powerful weapons therefore retain their advantage instead of having their damage simply deleted.

• Bosses can optionally survive one extreme opening burst while above 50% HP, leaving them critically vulnerable instead of allowing instant deletion.

Rescaling & Stability Improvements

• Old Powered Mobs modifiers are removed before new modifiers are applied.

• Repeated rescaling does not stack modifiers.

• Existing mobs preserve their health percentage when rescaled.

• Hot configuration changes now actually rescale loaded mobs.

• Cached scaling data includes relevant health and armor state.

Server-Side Compatibility

• Corrected network compatibility mode to IGNORE_SERVER_VERSION.

• Clients do not need Powered Mobs installed.

Debugging

Improved administrative visibility:

• /poweredmobs stats

  • Displays offensive and defensive player power profiles.

• /poweredmobs debug

  • Displays local power

  • Mob category

  • Scaling snapshot

  • HP multiplier

  • Armor contribution

  • Rupture state

v1.0.0 — Initial Release

Hybrid Global / Local Difficulty

• Added local progression based on nearby real players.

• Combined nearby player average with the strongest nearby player.

• Added lower-weight historical server progression.

• Added depth and distance-based world difficulty.

• Added configurable Nether and End multipliers.

• Added basic new-player protection.

Persistent Player Progression

• Individual player difficulty persisted between server restarts.

• Difficulty increased from hostile kills and bosses.

• Player deaths reduced difficulty.

• Player progression combined difficulty with additional maximum health.

Mob Health Scaling

• Added configurable flat and multiplicative health scaling.

• Scaling modifiers were applied anti-accumulatively.

• Rescaling preserved each mob's current health percentage.

• Bosses used a reduced scaling category to prevent extreme HP sponge behavior.

• Farm mobs and excluded entities could use separate limits or exclusions.

Souls-Like Anti-One-Shot Combat

• Introduced poise/stagger mechanics for extremely powerful attacks.

• Added soft damage compression instead of a simple flat damage cap.

• Added tier-based shields for Hellmarked Elite/Ultra/Infernal mobs.

• Shields regenerated outside combat.

Adaptive Mob Damage

• Mob damage scaling occurred before armor.

• Damage scaling used the health/progression of the player actually being attacked rather than only a server-wide average.

• Used sublinear scaling so additional health remained valuable.

• PvP and environmental damage were excluded.

Random Mob Effects

• Added configurable Resistance and Absorption effects to some hostile mobs.

• Effect chance and strength increased with regional difficulty.

• Resistance was limited by default to prevent accidental immunity.

Hellmarked Support

• Added optional Hellmarked integration without requiring Hellmarked as a compile-time dependency.

• Detected Elite, Ultra and Infernal tiers.

• Applied reduced Powered Mobs scaling to Hellmarked enemies to avoid excessive double-scaling.

• Safely disabled integration when Hellmarked was not installed.

Administration

Initial /poweredmobs command set included:

• /poweredmobs list

• /poweredmobs get

• /poweredmobs set

• /poweredmobs reload

• /poweredmobs rescale

• /poweredmobs stats

• /poweredmobs debug

Current Compatibility

• Minecraft: 1.21.1

• Loader: NeoForge 21.1.x

• Installation: Server-side

• Optional integrations: Apotheosis, Hellmarked

• Designed for heavily modded environments where player health, armor, damage and defensive mechanics can greatly exceed vanilla values.

Design Goal

Powered Mobs is designed around one principle:

Player progression should always matter, but progression should not permanently trivialize the entire modpack.

A weapon that took hours to craft should still feel dramatically stronger. Endgame armor should still provide a major defensive advantage. Powered Mobs only recovers part of that power gap automatically, while the independent 0–250 difficulty system allows servers and advanced players to deliberately push combat into truly dangerous endgame territory.