HOLLOWREACH

RLCraft, brought up to Minecraft 1.20.1.

RLCraft never left 1.12.2. Thirteen years of Minecraft have happened since, and the pack that defined "hard survival" is still stuck on a version most people have moved off.

HOLLOWREACH is that pack, rebuilt on 1.20.1 — with nearly every feature brought back.

Thirst. Temperature. Limb damage. No natural healing. Skill-gated gear. Dragons that will end you on sight. Knapping flint before you can touch a tree. The whole survival tax, feature by feature.

Where a mod never made the jump — and plenty didn't — it was rebuilt. The herbalism, brewing and alchemy that Rustic and PotionCore used to provide now live in a custom mod written for this pack, so nothing is missing just because a 1.12 author moved on.

It is not a demake, and it is not "RLCraft-inspired". It is the same experience, on a modern version, with the gaps filled in.

The world does not ease you in

You do not heal on your own. Not from food, not from waiting. Bandages, a full night's sleep, and Regeneration are the only ways back to full — and First Aid tracks your limbs separately, so a wrecked leg slows you and a wrecked head kills you outright however healthy the rest of you is.

You will be thirsty. Drinking from a river will make you ill. Purify it, carry a canteen, or learn which fruit hydrates.

You will be cold, then too hot. Temperature swings with biome, weather, time of day and what you're wearing. Extremes do real damage.

You cannot punch a tree. Knap flint, make a knife and an axe, and earn your first log.

Nothing is graded by distance. There's no safe radius around spawn. What finds you on night one is whatever happened to spawn there.

You spend experience, you don't hoard it

Over 600 weapons, tools and armour pieces are locked behind skill levels — and you raise skills by spending XP levels, not by using them.

That XP is also what buys heart crystals. Every permanent heart is a level you didn't put into Attack or Defense. There is no right answer, and that trade is the spine of the whole pack.

Gold is deliberately strange: cheap to swing, but it wants Magic. Soft metal, odd properties.

A herbalism and alchemy chain of its own

The pack ships with HOLLOWREACH, a custom mod built for it:

• Twelve forageable herbs you can replant and farm
• Crops that climb wooden stakes, and grapes strung along rope
• Three fruit trees, one of which is how you get iron from a plant
• A real brewing chain — crush fruit by treading it in a tub (wear boots, or you'll contaminate the batch), ferment the juice for three days, and add a herb to turn plain drink into an elixir
• Alchemic condensers that distil herbs into effects, with a modifier slot that makes you choose: Horsetail buys duration, Marsh Mallow buys potency, never both
• Beekeeping — bottle a bee, and a colony will tend the crops around it
• 19 potions vanilla cannot brew, as drink, splash and lingering

And everything that wants to kill you

Ice and Fire dragons · Lycanites Mobs · L_Ender's Cataclysm · Mowzie's Mobs · Alex's Mobs · Apotheosis affixes and gems · Dungeons Arise · YUNG's Better Dungeons · Dungeon Crawl — with Epic Fight animations and Scaling Health blights on top.

The book explains what the game won't

An 8-chapter quest book covers the machinery nothing else signposts: the first ten minutes that decide a run, the healing model, how skills are spent, and the entire herbalism → brewing → condenser chain.

It never locks anything. It just tells you.

Before you install

• Minecraft 1.20.1 · Forge 47.4.10
• 6 GB RAM recommended, 4 GB minimum
• This pack is difficult on purpose. If you want a relaxed survival experience, this is not it.

Credits

Inspired by RLCraft by Shivaxi — the reason this pack exists. No RLCraft files are redistributed here; it was studied as a design reference, and it's a different Minecraft version entirely.

The HOLLOWREACH companion mod uses:

• Rustic by cadaverous-eris (MIT) — textures, models and the herbalism mechanics it rebuilds. Additional Rustic artwork by Nazenn.
• Croptopia by Thonk and Rainbowcraft2 (MIT) — fruit-tree crop textures and the leaf-crop model.
• Farmer's Delight by vectorwing (MIT) — read as a reference for the crop-boost pattern. No code copied.
• Reskillable Reimagined by Bandit-Bytes (MIT) — skill levels read through its public API.

The potion and ability layers are original work, inspired by PotionCore and Level Up! 2, with no code from either. Pam's HarvestCraft was used for nothing — it was looked at only as a reference for how staged fruit growth feels.

And thank you to every mod author in this pack. Their work is the pack.