ActuallyBetterVanilla

ActuallyBetterVanilla is a carefully built Vanilla+ modpack for Minecraft 1.20.1 focused on making the game feel deeper, more rewarding, and more complete without turning it into a giant kitchen-sink pack.

The idea behind the pack is pretty simple: Minecraft already has a great foundation, but a lot of its progression can be skipped or rushed through extremely quickly. Villagers can hand you some of the best enchantments in the game almost immediately, the early game is over in minutes once you know what you are doing, several bosses become irrelevant after one kill, and the game does not have much meaningful progression after defeating the Ender Dragon.

ActuallyBetterVanilla tries to fix that while still keeping the game recognizable.

Instead of replacing Minecraft with dozens of unrelated progression systems, the pack builds on top of the existing game. Exploration, bosses, dimensions, farming, building, storage, enchanting, multiplayer, and quality-of-life features are expanded in ways that are meant to work together.

Progression That Actually Matters

The early game has been extended so there is more of a journey between spawning into the world and immediately having full diamond gear.

Progression follows a general path like:

Primitive → Stone → Copper → Iron → Diamond → Nether → Wither → End → Ender Dragon → Postgame

Copper and iron are meant to feel like actual stages of progression rather than materials you completely ignore after your first hour.

The goal is not to make the game annoying or painfully slow. You will not be dealing with thirst bars, overly complicated crafting chains, or survival mechanics that punish you for simply playing the game.

Instead, progression is stretched out by making existing systems matter more.

Rebalanced Villagers

Vanilla librarian trading is one of the easiest ways to completely bypass enchanting and exploration.

ActuallyBetterVanilla reworks this by preventing librarians from selling several of the strongest enchantment families.

This includes enchantments such as:

• Mending
• Protection
• Sharpness
• Efficiency
• Fortune
• Looting
• Power

Villagers are still useful and worth building around, but repeatedly breaking and replacing a lectern until you get an endgame enchantment is no longer the best progression strategy.

Repeated zombie-villager cure discount abuse is also disabled.

The goal is to make villages helpful without letting them replace a huge portion of the game.

Better Enchanting

Enchanting has been adjusted so the enchanting table, exploration, structures, and boss rewards all stay relevant.

Powerful enchantments are meant to come from actual gameplay instead of simply rolling a librarian until you get exactly what you want.

Mending in particular has been pushed toward later progression.

Ancient Cities can provide access to powerful enchantment rewards, giving players an actual reason to explore one of the most dangerous structures in Vanilla Minecraft.

Ancient Cities and the Warden

Ancient Cities are much more important in ActuallyBetterVanilla.

Instead of being something you visit once for Swift Sneak and then forget about, they connect into the pack's advanced enchanting and exploration progression.

The Warden is intended to be a meaningful encounter rather than simply something you are always supposed to run away from.

Deeper and Darker expands this system even further with The Otherside, a new dimension accessed through Ancient City progression.

This gives the Deep Dark a real place in the long-term progression of the pack.

A Real Post-End Game

Defeating the Ender Dragon should not feel like you have finished everything the pack has to offer.

ActuallyBetterVanilla treats the Dragon as the beginning of the postgame.

After reaching the End, players can continue progressing through stronger bosses, new environments, better equipment, improved mobility, and additional exploration.

Cataclysm provides some of the largest and most dangerous boss encounters in the pack, while Progressive Bosses makes repeat Wither and Dragon fights more interesting.

The result is a world where defeating the Dragon is still important, but it is no longer the point where progression suddenly stops.

The Aether

The Aether is included as a major optional exploration branch.

It adds an entirely new dimension with:

• Floating islands
• Unique dungeons
• Boss encounters
• New equipment
• New materials
• Mobility options
• Exploration rewards

The Aether is intentionally not designed as mandatory homework.

You can explore it alongside the main progression path and earn useful rewards without being forced through every piece of content in a specific order.

Deeper and Darker

Deeper and Darker expands the Ancient City and Deep Dark experience.

Players can eventually access The Otherside, providing another major dimension to explore with its own environments, enemies, resources, and progression.

Because it ties directly into Ancient Cities and the Warden, it feels connected to Minecraft's existing progression rather than simply being another random portal dimension.

Alex's Caves

Alex's Caves dramatically expands underground exploration with rare cave biomes, unusual creatures, special resources, and unique mechanics.

These areas are intentionally uncommon, making finding one feel like a major discovery.

The mod gives mining and underground exploration much more variety without replacing Minecraft's normal cave system.

Bosses and Combat

ActuallyBetterVanilla includes a number of larger encounters through mods such as:

• Mowzie's Mobs
• L_Ender's Cataclysm
• Progressive Bosses
• The Aether
• Deeper and Darker

These bosses are intended to provide actual progression rewards rather than existing only as optional trophies.

The pack avoids forcing every boss into a strict linear order, so players still have freedom to explore and choose which challenges they want to tackle.

Better World Generation

Exploration is heavily improved while still preserving Minecraft's overall world style.

The pack uses several of YUNG's structure overhauls, including improvements to:

• Dungeons
• Mineshafts
• Strongholds
• Nether Fortresses
• Ocean Monuments
• Desert Temples
• Jungle Temples
• Witch Huts

Towns and Towers also expands villages and settlements throughout the world.

The goal is to make exploration more rewarding without filling every chunk with enormous structures.

Building

ActuallyBetterVanilla includes a large collection of building improvements while intentionally avoiding the feeling of having thousands of random decorative blocks with no purpose.

Building-focused mods include things such as:

• Supplementaries
• Amendments
• Quark
• Handcrafted
• Another Furniture

These expand furniture, decoration, redstone, building blocks, and small Vanilla-style mechanics.

You can build more detailed homes, towns, workshops, farms, storage rooms, and settlements while still maintaining Minecraft's original visual style.

Farming and Cooking

Food and farming have been expanded into a much larger part of the game.

The pack includes:

• Farmer's Delight
• Farmer's Respite
• Brewin' and Chewin'
• Nether's Delight
• Ocean's Delight
• Cultural Delights
• Cook's Collection

Cooking becomes more than simply eating steak forever.

Players can build kitchens, grow more ingredients, cook full meals, brew drinks, and create much more detailed farms.

These systems are especially useful for players who enjoy building long-term worlds rather than rushing straight toward bosses.

Better Storage

ActuallyBetterVanilla includes Sophisticated Backpacks and Sophisticated Storage.

Backpacks provide portable storage that can grow with your progression, while Sophisticated Storage gives players much better options for organizing large permanent bases.

The pack intentionally avoids large industrial storage systems such as Refined Storage and Applied Energistics 2.

Storage should become easier as your world grows, but it should still feel like Minecraft storage rather than a giant digital inventory terminal.

Multiplayer Friendly

ActuallyBetterVanilla has been built with long-term multiplayer servers in mind.

Several systems are included specifically to make persistent worlds work better.

Lootr gives each player their own structure loot, meaning one player exploring a dungeon does not permanently empty it for everyone else.

FTB Teams provides team support.

FTB Chunks provides land claiming and controlled chunk loading.

FTB Quests can provide progression guidance and milestones without forcing players through a rigid quest chain.

Corpse makes inventory recovery after death more manageable while still keeping death meaningful.

Waystones provide convenient long-distance travel once players have actually explored the world.

Waystones

Fast travel is available, but it is intentionally balanced.

Village Waystones can naturally appear, allowing important settlements to become travel hubs.

Random wilderness Waystones are heavily restricted so players still have to explore normally.

Teleportation also has a cost, preventing the system from completely replacing horses, boats, Elytra, Nether travel, and other forms of movement.

Waystones are meant to reduce repetitive travel in established worlds, not remove exploration.

Quality of Life

ActuallyBetterVanilla includes a large number of quality-of-life improvements because making controls less annoying should not require progression.

Features include:

• Inventory sorting
• Mouse Tweaks
• Crafting Tweaks
• AppleSkin
• WTHIT
• Enchantment descriptions
• Better advancement screens
• Advancement plaques
• Shulker Box Tooltips
• JEI recipe viewing
• Polymorph recipe conflict handling
• Carry On
• Xaero's Minimap
• Xaero's World Map

These mods improve usability without fundamentally changing the gameplay loop.

Shaders

ActuallyBetterVanilla supports modern Forge shaders through:

Embeddium + Oculus

The pack is designed to work well with Complementary Reimagined.

Shaders are completely optional.

Players who want maximum performance can simply leave shaders disabled without losing any gameplay content.

Performance

Even though ActuallyBetterVanilla contains a large amount of content, the pack is intentionally built to avoid unnecessary overlap.

It does not include several different mods attempting to overhaul the exact same system.

Performance tools and optimizations are included where they are compatible with the rest of the pack.

Dedicated servers can also use Chunky to pregenerate worlds before opening them to players, significantly reducing exploration-related lag.

spark is included for server profiling and troubleshooting.

What This Pack Is Not

ActuallyBetterVanilla is not intended to be a kitchen-sink modpack.

You will not find every popular mod thrown together simply because it exists.

The core pack intentionally avoids large systems such as:

• Mekanism
• Thermal
• Industrial Foregoing
• Applied Energistics 2
• Refined Storage
• ProjectE
• Mystical Agriculture
• Twilight Forest
• Blue Skies
• Ad Astra
• Apotheosis

Those mods can be great in other packs, but they would push ActuallyBetterVanilla away from its Vanilla+ design.

The focus here is on making Minecraft's existing progression better rather than replacing it.

Designed for Long-Term Worlds

ActuallyBetterVanilla is primarily meant for worlds that you want to keep.

Build towns.

Create farms.

Explore distant structures.

Fight bosses.

Develop transportation networks.

Build massive storage systems.

Explore new dimensions.

Return to older areas with better equipment.

Progress into increasingly difficult content.

The pack is designed so convenience increases as your world develops instead of giving you everything immediately.

Technical Information

Minecraft Version: 1.20.1
Mod Loader: Forge
Forge Version: 47.4.10
Java Version: Java 17

Recommended Memory

For most clients:

8 GB RAM allocated

For dedicated servers:

6–10 GB RAM is a good starting point.

Larger multiplayer servers may require more depending on player count, view distance, loaded chunks, and exploration.

New Worlds Recommended

ActuallyBetterVanilla should be played on a new world.

The pack contains extensive structure generation, cave content, dimensions, villages, and other world-generation changes that will not properly appear in already-generated areas.

For multiplayer servers, pregenerating a portion of the world with Chunky before opening the server is highly recommended.

Dedicated Server Support

A dedicated server pack is available for ActuallyBetterVanilla.

The server pack includes the required gameplay mods, world generation, progression scripts, configuration files, KubeJS, LootJS, FTB systems, and multiplayer features while excluding unnecessary client-only rendering and interface mods.

ActuallyBetterVanilla

Minecraft does not need to become a completely different game to have deeper progression.

ActuallyBetterVanilla is about taking the systems Minecraft already has and giving players more reasons to use them, explore them, and keep playing with them.

Explore more. Build more. Fight more. Progress further.

Minecraft, but progression actually matters.