🛡️ Aetas Ferrea - Hardcore Medieval Survival

"Natura non contristatur."
(Nature does not care.)

🧭 Aetas Ferrea: The Iron Age

Sanguis et ferrum. Blood and iron. You are a remnant of a fallen kingdom, thrust into an unforgiving wilderness where civilization has crumbled. The world is cold, brutal, and indifferent to your survival.

After a catastrophic collapse, the lands are now ruled by advanced predators, starvation, and elite progressive threats that watch from the shadows. Will you conquer the Iron Age, or become another forgotten skeleton in the mud?

"Aetas Ferrea" (Iron Age) is a modpack built entirely around realistic physical immersion and hardcore survival. Get ready to experience a brutal, uncompromising medieval world.

Focusing on extreme mechanical friction while providing feature-rich combat and exploration, you aren't just building a place to call home. You will be establishing a self-sustaining fortified kingdom to survive intelligent monster sieges. You decide your path: live a nomadic lifestyle, or forge a fortress capable of withstanding the end of the world.

⭐ Feature Overview ⭐

📜 Interactive Quests & The Evolving World

Guide yourself through the unforgiving early game with an interactive questline designed to teach you the brutal realities of survival. The wilderness is not static; the longer you survive, the harsher the environment becomes. Foes will grow smarter, scavenge better equipment, and coordinate their forces as the days march on. Tread carefully, for the secrets of legendary high-tier smithing are strictly locked away until the sky's true master has fallen.

⚒️ Authentic Crafting & A Restructured Economy

Over 100+ recipes have been completely overhauled to reflect realistic medieval manufacturing. Basic tools and weaponry require proper assembly components like rope, sticks, and raw materials.

Civilization has collapsed, and standard emeralds hold no value to the survivors. Peasants, merchants, and mystics demand materials reflecting their trade status, and they will require you to trade your old equipment tiers before upgrading you to higher-quality gear. Furthermore, gold equipment holds unique, innate properties, but it will dull and lose its efficiency as its durability splinters.

🩸 Medical Realism & Bare-Handed Trauma

Respect your mortality. Attempting to punch trees or mine solid stone bare-handed will physically shatter your hands, inflicting intense fatigue and direct physical trauma. Health is split into localized limbs: a broken leg will severely cripple your movement speed, while head trauma blurs your vision. Manage open bleeding wounds with specific bandages, and closely balance your thirst, body temperature, and nutritional needs to preserve your stamina pool.

⚔️ Directional Combat & The Armor Matrix

Master a fully dynamic, directional execution combat system utilizing historically accurate medieval weaponry. Your protection comes with a heavy physical cost. Arrow fire has a chance to deflect entirely off heavy plate armor, and slashing weapons find no purchase against high-tier steel—but heavy crushing axes and blunt weapons will bypass your guard to inflict devastating damage. Heavy plate armor severely limits your agility and restricts your vision, while lighter leather sets grant swiftness and mobility at the cost of vulnerability.

🐴 Equine Mastery & Pack Dynamics

Surviving the wilderness requires learning to master the beasts within it. Traveling and hunting have been entirely rewritten:

• Distinct Mounts: Horses possess unique classes, attribute capabilities, and specialized training paths. Riding them demands true handling, throttle-based acceleration, and logistical care. They will even struggle and sink in deep water if weighed down by armor or packed chests.
• Pack Instincts: Wolves are no longer passive pets. Wild packs roam the forests as highly aggressive predators, and managing tamed hounds requires strict discipline, pushing your pack limits too far will cause excess wolves to turn against their master.

👑 Nightfall Horrors & Nether Lords

Creepers and witches have been permanently purged from this world, replaced by far more calculated threats. When night falls, elite progressive undead emerge to lay siege to your fortresses. You will encounter specialized commanders—some leading armored sapper squads that break through solid stone walls, others growing terrifyingly faster as their armor layers shatter in combat. For those brave enough to venture into the underworld, the Vanguard and the catastrophic Monarch guard the deep basalt and structures of the Nether.

🐟 Ecological Balance

Nature operates on rigid, unforgiving biological laws. Chickens suffer wing fatigue and take fatal fall damage if dropped from high cliffs, spiders crawl strictly within their native forest canopies, and aquatic life abides by realistic physics. Even fishing requires deep knowledge of native environments, yielding nothing but junk if cast into the wrong biomes.

💀 "Memento Mori" - Hardcore & Multiplayer Penalties

Remember that you must die. Face off against the world in an unforgiving environment. If you die in single-player, the world ends permanently.

Multiplayer Support: Play with allies, but death still carries a heavy toll. Teammates can revive you from a downed, bleeding state without medicine, but the revived player will permanently lose 1 Max Heart from their total health pool. Choose who you save wisely.

🛠️ Mods Used

If I missed any mod my apologies, +250 Mods isn't easy to manage 😅

🎭 Resource Packs Used

🕯️ Shaderpacks Used

⚙️ Technical Notes & Requirements

To ensure Aetas Ferrea runs smoothly without crashing or breaking scripts, please follow these strict technical guidelines before launching:

• RAM Allocation: This is a heavy, script-dense modpack. A minimum of 6GB of RAM is required to run the game, but 8GB to 12GB is highly recommended for smooth world generation and shader performance. Do not allocate more than 12GB, as Java Garbage Collection will cause lag spikes.
• Java Version: Ensure you are using Java 17 or later, which is the required architecture for Minecraft 1.20.1.
• OptiFine Warning: DO NOT INSTALL OPTIFINE. This modpack relies on modern rendering engines (Embeddium + Oculus) for performance and shader support. Adding OptiFine will instantly crash your game and corrupt your visual rendering.
• Shaders: Shader support is built-in. For the intended photorealistic, gritty atmosphere, we recommend using Kappa Shaders (if you have a card that supports ray-tracing and has more than 8GB of VRAM) or Photon Shaders. You can enable them via the Video Settings > Shader Packs menu.
• Server Creation: If hosting a multiplayer server, ensure your server properties are set to hardcore=true to properly enforce the death and revival penalties. I also will soon create a server rack modpack that setups your own custom server for yourself without you having to do the hard part (If you don't like/trust Essential).
• Modifying the Pack: I highly recommend to NOT add, remove, or update any mods, resource packs, or KubeJS scripts. These components are strictly configured to work together. Modifying them poses a high risk of breaking the progression or world generation. Any issues submitted on GitHub originating from modified versions of Aetas Ferrea will be completely ignored.
• The Background Optimization State: To further protect your system, Aetas Ferrea comes pre-configured with FPS Reducer. This client-side utility automatically throttles Minecraft down to a minuscule 5 FPS whenever the game window loses focus. This stops the game from hogging your PC's resources, slashes laptop power consumption, and allows you to seamlessly multitask or use other windows while leaving the game safely idling in the background.

⚠️ Troubleshooting: Because this mod aggressively scales down hardware utilization, certain hardware architectures might experience minor visual glitches or a brief frame rate stutter (lasting longer than 3 seconds) upon tabbing back into the world if these latency bugs persist on your machine, you can safely disable this mod, it is strictly client-side and removing it will not break your server compatibility nor anything else. However, we highly recommend keeping it active to give your PC vital moments to breathe when you step away from the screen.

Note from the creator: I highly recommend to play with shaders, this modpack was fully tested with shaders! (All of the available in the shader packs menu)

🎥 Quality & Performance Presets

🎥 Atmospheric & Quality Presets

Choose your profile below based on your system's capabilities.

🛠️ Internal Render & Simulation Profiles

To manually match or verify these presets in your video settings, use the following structural guidelines:

📊 Expected Performance & Frame Targets (NOT A GUARANTEE)

Aetas Ferrea is heavily optimized to deliver maximum visual fidelity while strictly maintaining fluid gameplay above 60 FPS and both keyboard & mouse polling rate of 1000HZ.

• The Shipped State: By default, your frames are capped at 90 FPS.
• Tuning For Beefy Rigs: If you are running high-tier desktop hardware, you can and absolutely should increase or unlock this cap in your video settings.
• The Warning: Keep in mind that pushing your machine to churn out excessive, unnecessary frames will severely drain laptop batteries and generate intense system heat. Leaving the cap at 90 FPS provides your hardware with vital performance headroom allowing your CPU and GPU to stay cooler, preserve power, and smoothly absorb sudden processing spikes during massive, resource-heavy moments without stuttering.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

⚔️ Gameplay & Mechanics

Q. I can't punch trees to get wood. How do I start?!

A. Check your Questbook! You are a mortal, not a superhero. You must forage the ground for loose pebbles, flint, and twigs to craft your very first primitive hatchet. Punching blocks bare-handed will actively damage your limbs and hand structure.

Q. The game is way too hard!

A. If you are really struggling, you can try disabling or removing Zombie Awareness and/or Enhanced AI. This will make the game much easier, but keep in mind it might cause unexpected balance issues and/or make things too easy.

Q. Why am I suddenly so slow/blind/losing hearts?

A. You likely took structural damage to a specific limb. This effect is worsened if you are wearing heavy plate armor, which restricts vision and drains your stamina pools quickly. Leather armor, on the other hand, grants a flat movement speed increase.

Q. How does multiplayer death actually work?

A. If you play solo, death is permanent. On a multiplayer server, dropping to 0 HP puts you in a "downed" bleeding state. Friends can revive you without medicine, but as a penalty, you will permanently lose 1 Max Heart from your total health pool.

Q. Where are the creepers? How do I get gunpowder?

A. Creepers and Witches were completely banished from the game engine because they do not fit the medieval thematic landscape. If you need gunpowder, you will need to find alternative recipes to craft it manually.

Q. Can I play this with a controller?

A. The dynamic, directional combat might feel incredible on a controller! However, you will need to add a controller support mod yourself. Do so at your own risk, keeping the Technical Notes above in mind.

⚙️ Performance & Troubleshooting

Q. I have a beefy PC / >=8GB of RAM allocated, but my game still lags or stutters.

A. Try the following steps to improve performance:

1. Make sure your Render and Simulation Distances aren't set too high (quality presets).
2. Try disabling or removing the Subtle Effects mod.
3. Lower your overall graphics settings to "Fast".
4. If using shaders, lower their quality settings and ensure your GPU drivers are up to date.

Q. I want to play with shaders. What is the most lightweight/compatible option?

A. Currently, the best option for both performance and compatibility is MakeUp-Ultra Fast. It still looks decent with almost no impact on your performance, and it works great across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Q. Why is my game sometimes capped at 60 FPS?

A. This MIGHT be caused by the FPS Reducer mod. The easiest fix is to Alt+Tab out of the game, and then physically click the Minecraft icon on your taskbar to tab back in. Your FPS should return to your normal cap.

Q. I see ERRORS/WARNINGS in my launch console, is this normal?

A. Yes! Most errors and warnings are completely normal background noise from Minecraft and Java.

📦 General & Modpack Info

Q. How do I play multiplayer?

A. Create/join a world -> ESC -> Open to LAN and there you go, a link in few seconds will appear, copy that and send to your friends and they just have to direct connect, simple! (E4MC not essential mod).

Q. Can I download this modpack, modify it myself, and publish it?

A. Yes! Just make sure to credit the original modpack with a link in your description.

Q. Will you port Aetas Ferrea to Fabric, NeoForge, or newer versions like 1.21?

A. Likely not. The highly specific AI, siege structures, and mechanics that make this pack work are fundamentally tied to 1.20.1 Forge. Porting it would mean waiting for the original creators to update their mods, and I would have to reconfigure the entire modpack from scratch. (Fun fact: At the start of this project, I actually tried developing it on NeoForge 1.21.1!)

Q. Why can't I remove certain resource packs?

A. These packs are locked by design to ensure a consistent experience for everyone, especially on multiplayer servers. While resource packs can easily be used to exploit or cheat (like using X-ray packs), keeping them mandatory helps ensure everyone plays fairly and stays on the same team! (even tho this is easily exploitable!!!)

Q. I see unknown versions/authors on some mods, is this normal?

A. Yes. I have custom-modified a lot of mods to include features and/or fixes they didn't originally have. Some authors are still listed if I was able to tag them, but others are missing because they don't have an account on this platform or the java file bugged out.

Q. How can I report issues?

A. Scroll down this page until you find the "Official GitHub Repository for Aetas Ferrea" link and click it, then head to the "Issues" tab to create a new ticket. Alternatively, just click the "Issues" button at the top of the Modrinth page.

Q. How can I give you a donation or compensation?

A. I don't accept any forms of donations! I'm perfectly fine, I made this modpack as a hobby and just doing it for fun.

🗺️ Roadmap

This is a temporary roadmap. Future project tracking and development milestones will officially transition over to the GitHub Roadmap tab soon!

• <input type="checkbox" disabled style="margin: 0px 0.35em 0.25em -1.6em; vertical-align: middle;" checked> Visual Redesigns: Create and implement realistic medieval textures for the Spartan Weaponry & Armor mod.
• <input type="checkbox" disabled style="margin: 0px 0.35em 0.25em -1.6em; vertical-align: middle;"> RPG Overhaul: Create and implement realistic medieval textures for the Realm RPG mod series.
• <input type="checkbox" disabled style="margin: 0px 0.35em 0.25em -1.6em; vertical-align: middle;"> Server Pack Release: Package an easy-to-deploy server files zip, allowing users to host their own custom servers seamlessly.
• <input type="checkbox" disabled style="margin: 0px 0.35em 0.25em -1.6em; vertical-align: middle;"> Quality Presets: Implement in-game performance configurations directly inside the video options menu.
• <input type="checkbox" disabled style="margin: 0px 0.35em 0.25em -1.6em; vertical-align: middle;"> World Generation: Integrate more immersive, authentic medieval structures and ruins.
• <input type="checkbox" disabled style="margin: 0px 0.35em 0.25em -1.6em; vertical-align: middle;"> Campaign Expansion: Write and implement additional quests to expand the core storyline.
• <input type="checkbox" disabled style="margin: 0px 0.35em 0.25em -1.6em; vertical-align: middle;"> Bug Fix: Resolve the camera clipping and control glitches experienced when riding camels in third-person view.
• <input type="checkbox" disabled style="margin: 0px 0.35em 0.25em -1.6em; vertical-align: middle;"> Better UI/UX: Improvements on custom GUI and a better startup video.

⚖️ Modified Mod Distribution & Compliance

To specific mechanics integration, and resolve upstream locale errors, this compilation includes modified, custom-patched open-source binaries. In absolute compliance with open-source transparency guidelines, the exact modifications are outlined here:

⚙️ Patched Binaries Directory

• Shield Overhaul (Author: ElocinDev)

  • Patch Applied: Fixed an exploitative velocity-stacking calculation bug within the shield bashing physics loop that allowed players to achieve permanent aerial flight states. (This wasn't possible to do with KubeJS)

• Legendary Survival Overhaul (Author: Legendary_Workshop)

  • Patch Applied: Written and injected a custom Java API compatibility bridge allowing internal mod elements to securely receive and send data manipulation requests directly through KubeJS scripts.

• Medieval Paintings (Author: TheGreatZin)

  • Patch Applied: Resolved a critical JSON formatting syntax error inside the assets/medieval_paintings/lang/en_us.json localization manifest that caused all paintings to render as raw unreadable system keys (paint.etc) rather than localized medieval titles.

• Combat Roll (Author: ZsoltMolnarrr)

  • Patch Applied: Written and injected a custom Java API compatibility bridge, allowing other mods and kubejs manipulation.

🛑 Legal Disclaimer & Support Notice

These modifications are maintained independently by the Aetas Ferrea development pack author purely to support compatibility. None of these modifications are endorsed, sponsored, or supported by the original mod authors.

If you encounter crashes, item visual bugs, or script errors involving these MODS, DO NOT contact or submit bug tracking tickets to the original creators. All bugs, logs, and issue diagnostics must be submitted exclusively to the Aetas Ferrea GitHub Repository.

🪰 Known Issues

• Camera/Controls glitches when riding camels in 3rd person
  • Recommendation: Stick to first-person view while riding camels.
• REALM RPG & Legendary textures don't fit the modpack
  • I will eventually replace these by creating more resource-packs but for now it will be kept as it is.
• Minecraft flickering
  • Minecraft video pipeline is bugged, try borderless window mode to see if it fixes.

😁 Special Thanks

Thanks to all the mod/resource-pack/shaders creators! Otherwise creating such modpack would've been impossible!

Note: All shaders have been configured by myself to ensure a completely level playing field. Whether you play with shaders enabled or disabled, there are absolutely ZERO competitive advantages—both settings feature the exact same render distance, visibility and standard ore textures (no glowing ores). If you find anything at all that has an advantage over the other, please open a ticket and I'll hotfix it.

THE FOLLOWING WEBSITES ARE THE ONLY OFFICIAL WEBSITES THAT HOST AETAS FERREA CONTENT. ALL OTHER WEBSITES ARE NOT ASSOCIATED WITH US AND ANY CLAIMS OF THEM BEING OFFICIAL ARE FALSE. PLEASE AVOID THEM AT ALL COSTS AS THEY MIGHT CONTAIN MALICIOUS CONTENT.

• Official GitHub Repository for Aetas Ferrea
• Official Modpack Page on Modrinth

Aetas Ferrea is NOT affiliated with or endorsed by Mojang, Microsoft, or any other third party. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

NOT AN OFFICIAL MINECRAFT PRODUCT. NOT APPROVED BY OR ASSOCIATED WITH MOJANG OR MICROSOFT.