Soulsand

Minecraft as it was meant to be.

Soulsand is a vanilla+ survival experience that expands Minecraft without losing that core Minecraft feel. This pack contains many optimization mods, quality of life improvments, and overhauls where the game needs it most.

A Bigger World

The Overworld uses Terralith and Tectonic and Streams Reloaded to create larger, more varied landscapes with improved terrain generation. The Nether has been expanded with Amplified Nether and additional structures, while Stellarity completely expands the End and gives you a reason to actually explore it after reaching it.

Some vanilla structures have also been disabled or adjusted using Structurify. These settings can easily be changed through Mod Menu if you want to customize your experience. I have a few structures turned off as they would cause this pack to freeze and become deadlocked. Most notably, I have the Chapel of Light off, where the Stellarity boss is located, due to the pack freezing when loading it in. 

More to explore

The world is filled with additional structures, dungeons, enemies, bosses, loot, and other encounters.

The goal isn't to overwhelm you with hundreds of new systems. Instead, the pack focuses on making exploration feel worthwhile and giving you more reasons to leave your base. The pack includes both Explorer's Compass and Nature's Compass.

Better Transportation

Getting around the world has been greatly improved.

• New ships provide better ways to travel across oceans.
• Minecarts can reach up to 20 blocks per second, making rail networks much more practical.
• Waystones allow fast travel while still having a meaningful cost.
  • 5 XP levels per 1,000 blocks in the Overworld
  • 20 XP levels per 1,000 blocks in the Nether
  • Maximum cost of 30 levels

Elytras have also been made more difficult to obtain due to the End City rework from Stellarity and the extra mobs in the pack, keeping them as a meaningful late-game reward rather than something that immediately trivializes exploration.

Backpacks Without Replacing Shulkers

A backpack mod is included for additional inventory space and convenience.

However, to prevent backpacks from making Shulker Boxes obsolete, the pack is soft-capped at one backpack per player.

Shulkers still have an important place in late-game storage and transportation. They have been made more convenient with the Easy Shulker Box mod that lets you interact with them without placing 

Potions stack

I set potions to stack up to 3 per stack. It felt fitting, as that's how many you can brew at once. 

Performance

Includes things like Sodium/Iris, C2ME, FerriteCore, ImmediatelyFast, Entity Culling, More Culling, and Krypton.  C2ME is limited to 2 threads in the configs. 

Recommended Java Arguments

For the best performance, I strongly recommend using:

-XX:+UseZGC -XX:+ZGenerational 

Note: Java arguments can vary depending on your hardware and server setup. You may not need every argument on every system.

RAM

The pack was tested with 4480 MB of RAM allocated to Minecraft. This is the configuration used for my testing and is the baseline I recommend starting with.

If you plan to make heavier use of Distant Horizons, increasing the allocated RAM may be beneficial. I have been limiting the LOD distance to 64 chunks and set LOD fade to false.

More world.
More adventure.
More to discover.

Minecraft as it was meant to be.