Au Naturel 5 - A New Nature-Based Survival Experience

Update 21/03/2026 - Overwhleming number of new mechanic changes with many more custom mods written post 5.0.5! We now have our own fishing system running in the background, slower boats, primitive weapons, our own reimplementation of Spice of Life, can't swim up waterfalls, can't remain buyoant while wearing heavy armor, lower heart start, and rope in your default starter pack to allow you to rapel down from any tree spawns or just get around the environment a bit more in early game.

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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 illagers 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 more than a year of development, 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 25 Temurin available here: https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/?version=25

Currently recommended java 25 start parameters:

-Xmx16G -XX:+UseCompressedOops -XX:+UseStringDeduplication -XX:+UseCompactObjectHeaders -XX:+UseZGC -XX:+ZGenerational

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.

An example of the stratified climate world gen

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