The Polycentricity community is running a survival server with this modpack, so come join us!

Summary

Minecraft Origins focuses on the core aspects of Vanilla: survival, crafting, and exploration. It is designed to present a challenge to experienced players, encouraging specialization in certain areas to make multiplayer much more viable.

Survival

Surviving in Minecraft Origins is a difficult task; unlike in vanilla survival, you cannot just set a potato plot down and expect to survive indefinitely. Players will need to manage body temperature, thirst, nutrition, and a host of other vitals to stay in peak condition. However, it also offers a variety of tools to help you stay alive in this harsh world. Various armor sets will not only modify your temperature, but will also grant a small buff if a complete set is worn. This encourages using armor materials more varied than diamond, adding diversity to gameplay both in singleplayer and multiplayer.

Players will also have to contend with various tweaks that modify general survival. Carrying thousands of blocks of gold is no longer viable thanks to a weight system, but roads constructed from stone brick or other materials can offer a slight speed boost.

Crafting

The early game is especially challenging, with players forced to gather flint for starting tools instead of creating wood or stone ones. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is essentially the only way for players to survive, with farming and ranching difficult with early game resources.

Tool and material progression has been tweaked significantly, and tool crafting has been overhauled using Adventurer's Toolbox and Tinker's Forging. Expect to be using flint tools for a while until you can gather enough copper for a copper anvil, which is needed to craft the first tier of metal tool parts. From there, nickel and lead offer a stepping stone up to iron, with progression culminating in steel tools with diamond adornments.

CraftTweaker has been used extensively to modify various vanilla and modded recipes to make them more immersive and challenging. You will need to create Immersive Engineering's metal plates on an anvil, for example, before using them to craft buckets or iron doors. Rails have been similarly changed, requiring forged iron rods instead of simple ingots.

Exploration

Geographicraft has been used to create a continental world with latitudinal climate zones. Travel North to find freezing biomes, or head to the equator to discover scorching deserts. Venture far enough North to find the legendary ice cap, which offers a perfect setting for isolated bases on a server.

Ore generation has also been modified to create sparse but rich ore veins scattered throughout the world. This encourages the creation of mining outposts spread over hundreds of meters, or in multiplayer, fights for control over resources. The days of a single mine or quarry that provide every needed resource are over; instead, you will need to efficiently mine out ore veins that are large, but not very dense. This can make starting out in survival very difficult, with early game ores realistically gathered from surface deposits due to the lack of strong pickaxes.

Thank you to everyone from the Polycentricity discord for helping with beta testing, and especially to Xfos for the pack icon!