Tribulation - Difficulty Overhaul

Tribulation 1.1.0 makes the world push back harder. Blood moons, elite champions, and pack tactics turn a crowd into a real threat, an optional pressure layer lets the night itself close in, and a new Ascendant Shard lets you court the danger early instead of waiting out the clock. Everything is still configurable, still zero dependencies.

Added

• Blood Moon — full-moon nights in the Overworld now have a 25% chance to rise blood red. The moon-phase scaling triples, hostile spawn caps double, and you can't sleep through it. The sky, fog, and moon tint crimson with a warning sting, and a Blood Moon survives a mid-night restart. Operators can force one on or off with /tribulation bloodmoon.
• Elite Champions — once you pass level 50, roughly 5% of hostile mobs spawn as nameplated minibosses carrying one or two random affixes: Vampiric, Explosive, Repulsing, Thorns, or Regenerating. A champion has 1.5× health, 1.25× damage, drops 3× the XP and an extra loot roll, and never appears on a boss.
• Pack Tactics — at tier 3 and above, striking a zombie, skeleton, or spider turns up to 16 mobs of its kind within 16 blocks that can see the fight against you, and those mobs spawn in larger groups. No more picking a horde apart one at a time.
• Environmental Pressure (opt-in) — an optional layer where the world presses back. Debilitating Strikes (tier 3+) sap your strength on a hit from a scaled hostile, and Oppressive Nights (tier 4+) let high-tier night mobs track you from farther away as the dark closes in a little tighter.
• Ascendant Shard — a crafted counterweight to the death penalties: four Shatter Shards around a Nether Star, raising your difficulty level by 25 on use. Chase harder mobs and their richer rewards on your own terms instead of waiting out the clock.
• Location-based threat — flat level offsets tied to where a mob spawns. Per-biome offsets single out hostile ground (the Deep Dark is deadlier), and per-structure danger zones turn landmark raids into a gauntlet — ancient cities, end cities, nether fortresses, bastions, and more. Both understand biome and structure tags, so modded content slots in.
• Multiplayer group health (opt-in) — mobs gain +20% health for each extra player nearby, capped at +100%, so a crowd that ganks a mob doesn't also trivialize it. Health only — grouping up never inflates the XP those mobs drop.
• Offline Level Decay (opt-in) — after a grace period away from the server (7 days by default), your level slowly slips, 2 levels per day gone, so a returning player meets a difficulty that matches their rust. It never drops below a configurable floor.
• Meridian integration — with Meridian installed, tier-4 and tier-5 scaled mobs wield a bonus of its curated combat enchants on their weapons and armor, on top of the vanilla ones, so endgame gear feels like it belongs in a Meridian world. Toggle it off any time, and never required.
• Two new difficulty statistics — Ascendant Shards used and levels lost to offline decay — join the counters in the Statistics → Custom screen.

Changed

• The server now syncs its config to joining clients, with a local-file fallback, so client-side visuals match the server's rules in multiplayer.
• First-join and first-level-up now come with brief teaching moments, and your first tier-up points you at the tier detail panel.
• Death Relief announces itself with an actionbar message and a HUD flash when it drops your level.
• Heart Fragment and Ascendant Shard details now show in the base item tooltip, not only inside recipe viewers, and every config screen entry gained a tooltip.
• Soul Inventory now honors any enchantment tagged #c:soulbound, so soulbound-style protections from other mods count.
• Player-facing /tribulation output — your level, tier, progress, and hearts — is now localized.

Fixed

• The level badge HUD no longer drops sprites when ImmediatelyFast or Blur+ is installed.
• HUD offset settings are clamped to the screen, and a corrupted or hand-edited save can no longer push a player's level, hearts, or a mob's ability tier out of bounds when a world loads.
• Fixed a lighting glitch on synced Blood Moon and oppressive nights.
• The Heart Fragment and Shatter Shard no longer render clipped at the edge of their icon — every item sprite now keeps a clean margin inside its canvas and sits centred in the slot.