You are dropped into a foreign, hostile environment, nothing like what you've experienced in even the most dismal swamps. You see none of the comfortable landscapes you have become familiar with. Just wet, slimy trees - and the sludge from which they sprout - scattered amongst marshland that stretches as far as the eye can see. You smell rotting vegetation, your stomach rumbles, and you swear you can hear a growl in the distance...

Here's the one-sentence premise: You spawn in the Betweenlands, and all Vanilla items, recipes, and dimensions are disabled.

For this pack, "Hardcore" refers to more than just the gamemode. The gamemode is optional, of course, but this pack is still "hardcore" in the sense that it is distilled purely to The Betweenlands, and only The Betweenlands. This is meant to be the perfect middle-ground between playing the lone mod, and playing a larger pack that's bloated with things that don't fit the Betweenlands experience. Every time I play this pack, I find a new thing that can be polished and improved, bringing it closer to my perfect ideal of The Betweenlands.

Each mod in this pack was carefully chosen for quality-of-life or aesthetic improvements to the game, without adding any information or extra features that would make portions of The Betweenlands obsolete. There is no minimap; you'll have to actually stay aware of your surroundings, at least until you can craft your own Amate Maps. Enemy health is not displayed; you'll have to just keep swinging until that monster is dead, at least until you can get the Bark Amulet.

This pack works equally well in Singleplayer or Multiplayer, as well as in Hardcore Mode or standard Survival.

Betweenlands Hardcore