Vanilla Progression
You don't level up. Your civilization does.
You've placed a wooden marker in a clearing and called it a Blacksmith. It isn't one yet - it's a block in some grass. So you build a forge around it. A real one: an anvil, a furnace, iron blocks stacked where iron blocks go, a stone floor, walls, a roof to keep the rain off.
Nothing tells you where to put any of it.
Then the marker turns green, and it says Blacksmith I, and every person in your town can suddenly craft iron.
That's the whole mod. It reads what you actually built.
No new ore. No new armour tier. No stat bar.
Vanilla Progression adds no materials and no numbers to grind. It adds a reason for your base to be a town.
Thirty-two building types, seven tiers each, every one of them a real structure you lay block by block out of things that already exist in Minecraft. There is no build menu and no ghost preview. A Farm wants tilled soil and water and a composter - put them anywhere, in any shape, and the scanner will find them. A Watchtower wants height. A University wants bookshelves, and then more bookshelves, and eventually a Magic Academy next door.
Build it wrong and the mod tells you exactly what's missing and by how much. Build it right and the whole settlement moves up.
Four things happen in order
1 - Found a town. Craft a Settlement Core, put it where the centre should be, name it. That block is your Town Hall from now on, and your border runs 100 blocks in every direction.
2 - Put down a marker. One per building type. This is you saying "a blacksmith goes here".
3 - Build the thing. Blocks around the marker, materials into the marker - it opens like a chest, so nothing is ever taken out of your hands by accident. Hoppers work, which stops mattering as a convenience and starts mattering a great deal around tier IV.
4 - Everyone rises. Buildings feed the Town Hall, the Town Hall sets the settlement level, and the settlement level unlocks gear for every member of the town at once. One player's afternoon of hauling stone is everybody's diamond pickaxe.
What you're actually signing up for
| 32 buildings × 7 tiers | Farm, Blacksmith, University, Harbor, Keep, Walls, Watchtower, Nether Gate, End Spire, Brimstone Works… |
| Real prerequisites | Blacksmith VII wants Mine V and Quarry V. You can't tower up one building while the rest of the town is a field |
| Shared unlocks | Progress belongs to the settlement. Five people build five times faster, and costs never scale with player count |
| Enchanting that grows | Your University sets the ceiling. A Magic Academy lets you see all three offers, pull treasure enchants at the table, and pick the one you want |
| A world that pushes back | Mobs are tougher everywhere, tougher again in the Nether and the End, and tougher still near a developed town - and there are more of them |
| Raids | Waves scaled to your tier and your population, with a warning, a boss bar, and real defences worth building against them |
| Population & food | Both derived from what you built. It's planning pressure, not a second hunger bar - and a shortage tells you which building to raise and where it is |
| Members & roles | Founder, Officer, Member. Contribution tracking. A summary of what changed while you were away. A solo player never sees any of it |
| An endgame | Nether and End milestones, sulfur caves, and earned recipes - a high enough building lets your town craft ender pearls, gunpowder, shulker shells |
Two promises, and the mod keeps both
Nothing you build is ever taken away. Your border only grows. A lost raid costs you stored materials and some repairs - never a tier, never a piece of territory. A starving town is slowed down, not demoted. There is no state in this mod that punishes you by undoing work.
Nothing fails silently. Every refusal names what's missing. Can't craft that? It says which unlock, and what the unlock needs. Building won't level? It says which blocks, which materials, and which other buildings it's waiting on. Raid won't start? The Raid tab names the exact rule blocking it.
That second one sounds small. It's the difference between a progression mod and a guessing game.
Press K
Nine tabs, and none of them is a wiki you have to go read:
- Overview - where the town stands
- Buildings - every type, what it needs, what you have, with a search box
- Progress - your next level, spelled out
- Tree - the whole graph, top to bottom, tier by tier. Every unlock shows the items it
grants as icons. Type
diamond pickaxeinto the search and it lights up the node that grants it and the entire path to get there - Population - your citizens, your food, and what to do about it
- Raid · Threat · Trophies - what's coming, how hard it hits, what it drops
- Guide - the full manual, generated from the datapack your server has loaded, so it can never disagree with the numbers you're actually playing
For server owners and pack makers
Every number is datapack JSON. Building costs, tiers, the settlement ladder, mob scaling,
raid strength, defences, food, member roles, the endgame, earned recipes. All of it reloads with
/reload - no rebuild, no config GUI, no Java, no restart.
Override the exact path and the highest pack wins. The in-game guide regenerates from whatever you loaded, so your players read your numbers, not the defaults.
Raids can be switched off per server or per town. So can food pressure. Outsider protection stops strangers breaking your markers - and deliberately never touches ordinary blocks, because this is a progression mod, not a land-claim plugin.
Everything is decided server-side. The client only draws what it's told.
Balance, honestly
Early tiers are comfortably hand-buildable. From the middle up, the design assumes you automate. The four- and five-figure material costs at the top are deliberate, not an oversight - markers take hopper and dropper input for exactly that reason, and a tier VII building is meant to be a project, not an afternoon.
A tier is never just more of the last one. Climbing asks for more kinds of thing, so a finished building is a varied building rather than a bigger pile of stone.
The material ladder ends at netherite. No custom ore, no tier above it, no above-vanilla enchantment levels. After that, progression goes sideways: new buildings, new capabilities, new threats.
Commands
/vprog found <name> |
Found a settlement at the core you're standing by |
/vprog info |
Where your town stands |
/vprog building |
The nearest building, in full - what's missing, by how much |
/vprog tree |
The progression graph |
/vprog raid |
Raid status, or exactly why one can't start |
/vprog population |
Citizens, food, and where every number came from |
/vprog members · /vprog role |
Who's in the town and what they may do |
/vprog guide |
Opens the manual |
Status
Early release, and honest about it. The systems are complete and covered by 212 automated in-world tests that build real structures in a real world and check the answers.
What those tests can't do is see. They run headless - they prove the server and not one pixel - so the interface has had far less exercise than the rules behind it. Four rounds of playtesting have fixed a great deal of that, and every one of them found something no test could have.
Balance feedback is genuinely wanted. Because every number is datapack JSON, "this feels wrong" is a five-second fix rather than a new build.
Built for small cooperative servers, where the interesting question isn't "what tier is my pickaxe" but "what have we built together".
The VProg Team
