Soft Hardcore is a mod that makes players lose one heart of max health on death. If you die with one heart, you will enter Spectator Mode (like in vanilla Hardcore). To regain hearts, you must eat one of two given food options a set number of times (5 by default). Upon eating, the two slots will reroll and you will gain progress (see bar in image below). At max progress, you will regain one heart. Enchanted Golden Apples can be used as a wildcard, instantly giving you a heart back and rerolling your options. All vanilla foods are candidates for reroll by default, excluding raw foods like Raw Porkchop. Each food has an equal chance to appear, and you only need to eat one of them to gain progress.

All of this can be changed via the config. You can add and remove entries (including consumables from other mods), adjust the chances of foods appearing via weights, and configure the amount required to progress a stage (e.g. 3 Porkchops or 5 Cookies). You can also configure the amount of stages required to regain a heart, from 1 to 1000.

softhardcore-inventory-gui1
The purpose of this mod is to attempt to solve two problems at once:

1. The only vanilla option for raising the stakes beyond Survival is going straight to Hardcore. The problem with Hardcore is that it discourages spending time on anything that doesn't directly improve your odds of survival - builds, exploration, and passion projects all carry the risk of being wiped out entirely. Soft Hardcore bridges this gap by introducing real consequences to a Survival world without punishing players for playing the way they enjoy.

2. In vanilla Minecraft, the only foods worth farming are Golden Carrots for max saturation and Steak or Porkchops for efficiency. Everything else is, from an optimisation standpoint, redundant. You can grow it, but there's little reason to. Soft Hardcore addresses this by giving diverse farms genuine value. If you die, you might find yourself needing Melons, Beetroot, or Pumpkins to recover, so having them around stops feeling pointless.

This is the very first version of the mod. There haven't been any bugs so far from my testing, but please let me know in the comments if you run across anything. I also plan to add presets for different food pools, with different weights and foods required. If you have any ideas for that, or anything else, again feel free to leave comments! Right now the mod is only available for a few versions, but I will add compatibility with other versions in time. Requesting specific versions will show me what order I should update this mod in, so do that.

Because this mod is still in active development, it is set as All Rights Reserved. You may include it in any modpacks without asking permission, but you may not redistribute modified versions without my consent.

Soft Hardcore Lite