The Sundering

The Nether no longer waits to be visited: it invades the Overworld.

Once someone has been to the Nether, rifts begin to tear open near villages at night. Piglin war bands pour through to steal the village's gold and burn its houses, wave after wave, led by the hammer-wielding Piglin Chieftain or, when the village is rich, the towering Piglin Warlord. Defeat the leader to close the rift. Lose, and a big village is captured and slowly rebuilt as a piglin stronghold.

- New bosses and fighters: the Piglin Warlord, the Piglin Chieftain, the Piglin Berserker with its twin golden axes, the Hoglin Rider.
- The Nether Rift, an animated portal that builds itself block by block.
- Village Treasuries: stone vaults of gold the piglins come for.
- Fire dragons sleep on their hoards in huge ruined keeps ringed by burnt land. They fly, breathe fire that scorches the land, snatch their prey, and once in a while attack a big village. Kill one to open its sealed treasury, and look for the keep's other treasure rooms.
- Villager kingdoms: the world is divided into named kingdoms with their own colors and banners. Their villages and walled towns have guards, builders who repair what burns, a jail; at each kingdom's heart stands its royal castle, with knights, full plate knights and the king on his throne.
- Trophies: the Warlord's Great Axe, the Chieftain's Hammer and the king's Royal Scepter, won from their owners; the knights' longswords can be crafted.

Everything is built to look and feel like vanilla Minecraft. Many options in the server config (fire spreading, block breaking, how often rifts open or dragons attack...).

About this release: this is an early beta, put out quickly to check that everything works in a normal game. A lot is still missing and you may run into bugs: please report them in the comments. The villager kingdoms will grow (border forts, soldiers, wars), and the illagers and the Ender Empire are coming.

Source code: the code will be open source later. For now it stays closed while the mod is unfinished, so nobody builds on a buggy early version of what the full mod is meant to be.

Made with AI: The Sundering is made by Akapush with Claude AI (Claude Opus 5.5).