Au Naturel
- By
Nature-based survival gameplay with a focus on opinionated game design and balance
2025-12-29_18.10.18.jpg
Description
Au Naturel 5 - A New Nature-Based Survival Experience
Update 10/08/2026 - Fresh update with version 5.0.14. Bug fixes, compatabilities, stability changes, mob rebalancing, shaders updated and oculus updated to prepare for incoming voxy compatability, minor tick efficiencies achieved, several mod updates.
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Au Naturel 5 is a strongly opinionated re-imagining of Minecraft survival in 2026. A sandbox open-world natural survival game, with considerations for balance, increased challenge, game-design and playability in a long-term forever world. Pro-struggle, anti-grind, no restrictions. Actions should be logical and convenient as possible but challenges should be due to the difficulty of engaging with a beautiful but personally indifferent and hostile world.
Au naturel is longer, slower, harder, but also more rewarding. Far more involved, challenging and creative than base minecraft. There are many tasks, goals, events, opportunities for exploration and resources for the player to persue, but none explicit or forced beyond basic survival.
So what should you do? That's up to you :) No quests. No achievements. Just you and a vast open world.
Try to live in the world for a calendar year. Survive. Explore. Build your home. Fight and defend it from both nature and intermittent raiders. Discover hostile villages and the pillagers of this land. Make your farm and your garden. Paint. Play music. Make a windmill or waterwheel and harness the power of nature. Make a well. Research and engineer powered flight. Build a lift. Create contraptions. Discover solar power. Dive into the caves, the depths and under the seas. Build a nuclear reactor if you really must. And now, if you get around to it, try to recreate a last bastion of civilization in this wild and hostile world with minecolonies and the beacon of civilisation.
With two years of development and still going, Version 5 aims to be a revolutionary reset in terms of performance, stability and playability, with new shaders, and an incredible level of low-level optimisations and integrations of key mods.
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Join the discord to ask questions, get guidance, offer feedback, report bugs, etc.
Recommended Java Settings:
We target Java 26 Temurin available here: https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/?version=26
Currently recommended java 26 start parameters:
-Xmx16G -XX:+UseStringDeduplication -XX:+UseCompactObjectHeaders -XX:+UseZGC
Recommended Potato Settings for the First Time!
If you want to try to run Au Naturel with a decent CPU but little else, and don't want to experiment with later versions of java or know enough to try to change garbage collectors, and you don't have huge amounts of ram, you can now try the following:
-Xmx8G
If you have small amounts of RAM and are comfortable with Java 25 or 26, try:
-Xmx8G -XX:+UseCompressedOops -XX:+UseStringDeduplication -XX:+UseCompactObjectHeaders
Disable or delete Distant Horizons before loading into game. It is responsible for significant RAM and resource usage.
Disable shaders in Oculus in game if you do not have the GPU to support them. Embeddium should run relatively well.
A non-exhaustive list of basic changes
- Start is based on gravel + flint and knapping flint on hard stone by holding flint in your hand and right clicking. Craft flint knife, get plant fibre, make string, craft flint axe, get wood, make planks, craft crafting table,craft flint pickaxe, struggle on from there. In game documentation has some details on trying to survive your first night. Use JEI to discover recipes and ingredient uses
- Distant Horizons Integration!
- New banded climate system: every world has climate zones running horizontally across the world. A tropical equator zone, banded by desert and arid zones to the north and south, banded by temperate zones, with arctic regions stretching on for eternity past that.
- Thirst
- Stamina
- Seasons
- Temperature
- Research
- Repairable tools, equipment and anvils
- Realistic Torches + Campfires
- Realistic Sleep
- Food poisoning + Food Spoilage
- Walljump!
- Falling Damage into shallow water + partial damage onto haystacks and leaves
- Countless new nature-based mobs spawning in appropriate biomes
- New foods and recipes
- Sapplings plant themselves
- Dynamic Trees and Tan's Huge Trees (running in survival + practically real-time)
- New Copper Weapons, Armour and Recipes including replacement of old iron rail recipes
- New ores + craftable recipes for many old and new minecraft items
- New terrain generation + Custom biome size and balancing. Many new and consciously balanced biomes from the most popular biome mods, fully integrated and compatible where other modpacks have struggled.
- Larger biomes to balance a real-world feel while still being small enough to move between biomes during an in-game day.
- Multitude of new blocks and building mods to let your imagination run wild
- New thematic weapons from spartan weapons
- Specifically customised version of photon shaders to generate a believable natural environment
- Ambient sound, environment and immersion enhancements
- Significant multiplayer changes inlcuding non-visible nametags, locality and proximity aware communication and craftable semi-realistic radios
- Fully customised configs, scripts, defaults, fixes and exclusions
- Heavily optimised
- New animations + Effects
- Resized, reskinned and highly variant biome appropriate mobs all with manually adjusted spawns and settings and blacklists so the world is more universally believable.
- Minecolonies
- Enhanced AI
- AND MUCH MUCH MORE!
A non-exhaustive list of removals
- Removed natural spawning of supernatural or fantastical minecraft mobs: no zombies, skeletons, creepers, endermen, etc outside of possibilities in specific structures. Explore though, you never know exactly what you will find around certain unnatural settlements or structures. Lord only knows what could be out there...
- No nether - well, lets be specific, it is very very difficult to get to the nether in practice, but it's technically still there.
- No end
- No elytra - but that doesn't mean you can't fly.
- No traders and no trading. Villagers aren't so friendly or receptive any more.
- No explicit enchanting or enchanting tables - non-random research table replaces enchanting
- No phantoms
- Removal and rebalancing of problematic mobs and options from the many additional mods in the modpack: I.e. no supernatural born from chaos mobs.
- No XP or experience grinding system
- No progression, no awards, no advancements, and no quests
- No lava buckets
- Boat transport nerf
- Underwater Mining Air-Pocket Nerf and limited placement of items into water
The Au Naturel Team
Owner
