UTFC: Unfair TerraFirmaCraft

A brutal hard-mode TerraFirmaCraft pack where every tool, machine and step from the stone age to Avaritia is earned the hard way.

TerraFirmaCraft already makes survival hard. UTFC makes it unfair. You start weaker, monsters grow stronger every day, ore is scarce, and the tech tree runs from knapped flint to infinity armour. Every machine is built in stages from real TFC materials, with no vanilla shortcuts.

Join the community: Discord (shared with our sister pack, LSTFC, under the NeonHouse community). There's also a button on the title screen.

Why "unfair"?

Most hard packs make you stronger over time. UTFC makes the world catch up with you.

Champions, Improved Mobs, Mowzie's Mobs and Enhanced Celestials (blood moons included) make sure the nights stay scary. Cold Sweat and TFC's own climate make the winters lethal. You start on April 1, so use the warm months well.

The climb

Stone age

Knap flint and rock and gather sticks and straw. Twist plant cordage: almost everything early is lashed together with it, from tools and firestarters to workbenches, barrels and chests. Knapping costs more than in stock TFC, and leaves drop less.

Copper and bronze

Prospect carefully, because veins are rare and mostly poor. Build a forge, pour your first ingots and weld a copper anvil. Chests come after copper: they need copper nails and a ring latch. Reaching a bronze anvil wins back your first heart.

Iron and steel

Bloomeries, a crucible lined with fire bricks and graphite, then a blast furnace wrapped in heavy wrought iron sheets. Each new anvil tier (wrought iron, steel, black steel) gives back another heart.

Create, the TFC way

• Andesite alloy only comes from a crucible: molten andesite (from loose rocks or cobble) alloyed with zinc, cast in an ingot mold.
• Shafts, gear blanks and cogwheels are glued and nailed together by hand.
• Kinetic mechanisms and casing frames go into every machine.
• Later parts come off assembly lines (sequenced assembly): circuits, casings, processors, engines.
• The big machines are built on mechanical crafters.

Immersive Engineering and Immersive Petroleum

Wind copper coils, rivet engineering blocks and generate power, though output is cut hard across IE, Crafts & Additions and Electro Energetics. Find oil reservoirs under any biome, pump them with a derrick and pumpjack, and distill diesel.

Mining at scale

Create Ore Excavation drills named deposits:

• metal lodes: Malachite Copper Lode, Banded Iron Formation, Sphalerite-Galena Lode
• minerals: Evaporite Basin, Graphite Kimberlite
• gems: Gem Gravel

Each yields a main ore and, by chance, its companion ores. Every drill needs water. Extractors pump lava pockets, brine springs and hot springs. Osmium has no ore in TFC worlds: it only comes from rare, deep deposits.

Mekanism

Circuits are assembled on belts; machines use more power and generators make less. Fission, polonium and antimatter are all real goals here.

The mining dimension

Late-game Mekanism unlocks a portal: a ring of teleporter frames lit with a Dimensional Igniter (polonium, antimatter, teleportation cores). It leads to a TFC world of its own:

• always day, and no monsters or predators ever spawn
• farm animals and wild food are still there
• about three times the ore: veins spread wider and grades improve

The digital miner is built around a mining matrix, a whole drilling machine wrapped in atomic alloy.

Avaritia

The endgame. Singularities take 10,000 TFC materials each. With no End, no Wither and no deep dark in TFC, those items are replaced with Mekanism polonium, TFC steels and blue and red steel netherite.

Storage, travel and quality of life

• Refined Storage, built behind Mekanism circuits and charged processors. Functional Storage drawers are riveted.
• Sophisticated Backpacks, with fewer slots; metal tiers need double sheets.
• Waystones on steel, Create Jetpack, Immersive Aircraft and elevators. Rare endermen in TFC biomes are the only source of ender pearls.
• JEI shows every recipe, including every assembly-line step. Jade, JourneyMap, FTB Chunks and Teams, Corpse, PlayerRevive and First Aid are all included.
• Performance: Sodium, Iris (shaders included), ModernFix, FerriteCore and Create Better FPS.

The quest book

A quest book of about 110 quests walks you through the whole climb, from the first knapped tool to the infinity catalyst. It explains what UTFC changed at each step and why. It gives no rewards: it's a guide, not a shortcut.

FAQ

Is this harder than stock TFC? Much harder. Expect to die, especially in the first weeks and the first winter.

Is it fair? No. That's the name. But every recipe can be made, and an automated check proves the whole progression can be reached in order, from the world's raw materials to the infinity ingot.

Why can't I use vanilla diamonds, iron or quartz? Every recipe uses the TFC version of a material where one exists: TFC gems, TFC metals, TFC + IE quartz shards.

Multiplayer? It's made for singleplayer first, but runs on dedicated servers too. I would recommend using Wabbanode for a dedicated server.

How much RAM? 8 GB recommended.

Can I add mods? Of course, it's your game. Recipes are tuned for the included mods, though.

Credits

UTFC is built on TerraFirmaCraft and the work of every mod author in the pack. Huge thanks to all of them. Every mod comes from CurseForge, and the full list is on the Mods tab.

Built for Minecraft 1.21.1, NeoForge.

If TFC ever felt too forgiving, this is for you. Good luck. You'll need it.