Changes the game rules to create NEW, INTERESTING CHALLENGES for players who have mastered the core game. Unlike Mojang's "hard" mode or other plugins'"hardcore" modes which just punish you more for making mistakes without actually changing game mechanics, Extra Hard Mode delivers interesting new challenges for advanced players.

Official Server

You can experience this plugin for yourself (as a player) by joining this public server. :) I maintain this server personally, which helps me catch bugs and spot opportunities for new features and improvements. Have fun!

• Extreme Survival: 198.23.130.217

Troubleshooting and Common Questions

Save yourself some time! Check this page for the answer to your question.

Features

Any of these features may be disabled in the config.yml file. Many may be "customized" to your liking. You may also enable these features only for specific worlds.

Players with the extrahardmode.bypass permission (default: op) will bypass these rules where possible.

Mining

• Stone is extremely hard, making tunneling with a pickaxe impractical. Players will have to scout the wilderness for natural caverns, or make their own caves with much-improved TNT (see below). This brings exploration, navigation, and risk-taking to the forefront of gameplay. The most successful players will be those who map the surface and develop a clever marking system for caverns.

• The TNT recipe produces 3 TNT, and each TNT explodes 100% more violently versus Vanilla TNT, making TNT a useful tool for mining and worthwhile to craft. Further, exploding TNT will produce a more "natural" devastation with lots of fallen rock and other rubble.

• Cave-ins are a persistent threat. Mining ore softens the stone around it, which can then fall and injure the careless player. Dirt and grass, which is often compacted into a solid mass in cavern ceilings and floors, will also come crashing down when disturbed. Of course, TNT can make a really big mess, since it also softens stone to subject it to the pull of gravity.

• Loose materials like cobble and dirt will fall like sand and gravel, forcing players to solve mining obstacles (like giant pits) by bringing appropriate building materials with them or getting very creative in their approach, rather than just using the dirt and cobble they conveniently picked up along the way.

• Underground, monsters spawn even in the light (but not very close to players). This includes silverfish, who can bury themselves in stone to attack again later.

• No permanent flames near diamond level (there's not enough air!). Players will have to get creative with their lighting, for example using dimmer redstone torches (spooky!), moving lava around with buckets (dangerous!), using glowstone (expensive!), or lighting temporary flint/steel fires (risky!). This also discourages players from dumping water on all the lava, since it can be a valuable source of light, holding monsters at bay.

Combat

• Double monster spawns near and under sea level in normal worlds. Caves are now more scary than the surface, as they should be.

• Spiders are more common under sea level and randomly drop web around them when slain, potentially introducing obstacles into an ongoing combat situation.

• A portion of creepers spawn charged, and will explode with the power of (Vanilla) TNT at the slightest touch. Get out your bow and arrow, run like hell, or get creative. Even falling from a small height may set off a charged creeper, making them truly terrifying to deal with. Be aware of your surroundings!

• Creepers sometimes drop live TNT when they die, challenging players to react quickly.

• Endermen sometimes teleport the player during combat.

• Witches are more common, any may appear anywhere on the surface. They use poison splash potions infrequently, preferring instead to summon henchmen, teleport, and toss explosive potions.

• Blazes spawn near bedrock in the normal world. These blazes are unstable and will explode violently when slain, often causing cave-ins.

• Blazes spawn everywhere in the nether, not just in nether fortresses, and may split into two full-health blazes when slain. They drop gunpowder and glowstone dust, both useful for faster diamond mining in the normal world. They also drop fire when attacked, introducing combat obstacles.

• Magma cubes are more common in the nether, and explode into blaze form when damaged.

• Skeletons have a chance to fire a knockback arrow or a silverfish, and your arrows will pass harmlessly through them.

• Zombies slow the player on attack, and often come back to life shortly after being slain, pushing players to rush forward into the unknown. If slain while burning, they will never re-animate.

• Zombie pigs are always hostile, because the nether isn't scary enough otherwise. When slain in nether fortresses, they reliably drop nether wart.

• Ghasts are impervious to arrows and drop 10x loot and experience when slain. Players will have to work hard to beat them, or flee in terror as fireballs explode behind them.

• The Ender Dragon respawns so that all players have a challenging common goal, and he always drops a dragon egg when killed. It makes a great trophy for the slayer's house. :)

Building

• Realistic block placement rules will force players to think a little harder about construction.

• Monster grinders are inhibited, meaning that most designs simply won't work. Players should take risks if they want rewards.

• Players may not attach torches to loose materials like dirt, grass, and sand.

• Torches left out in the rain will go out, falling to the ground as items.

Farming

• Irrigating crops is now non-trivial, because buckets will not move water sources. In early game, players who want faster crop growth have to search out natural water sources and plant near them. Players can eventually irrigate anywhere by collecting and moving ice (requires silk touch enchant) or trading for ice, then melting it. Remember, most crops do not REQUIRE water to be useful, they just produce faster when it's nearby.

• Some plants will die, forcing players to do the math and conserve their seeds. Of course bonemeal can be used to produce more seed for wheat, but overeating can quickly reduce a carrot or potato crop. This has the effect of rebalancing food sources, encouraging players to build bigger gardens for the same output.

• Melon seeds are not craftable from melon slices, restoring their status as a rare and desirable dungeon find. Players can still "roll the dice" by breaking a full-grown melon stem to see if they get an extra seed back.

• Bonemeal won't work on mushrooms. Mushroom farming will be limited to the more challenging and scientific mushroom spreading mechanic (dark place with suitable head room and room for shrooms to spread).

• Nether wart isn't farmable. Instead, players can get more by killing zombie pigmen in nether fortresses.

• All sheep are white, but may be dyed temporarily (for one shearing). Brown sheep are really just dirty white sheep, and black sheep are really just dirty brown sheep. :) This encourages players to learn how to make various dyes, and explore farming options for those dyes. It will also make some wool colors much more rare than others, since some dyes are more difficult (or impossible) to farm.

General

• Putting out a fire up close (by hitting it or trying to smother it with a block) will catch the player on fire. The best approach is to dump water or destroy the block beneath it.

• Environmental damage like falling, explosions, and suffocation reduces health more, and often applies temporary effects like slowing, blindness, or dizziness.

• On death, a small portion of the player's inventory disappears forever, discouraging players from killing themselves to restore health and hunger. After respawn, the player won't have a full health and food bar.

• Breaking netherrack may spark a fire.

Setup

Just drop the .JAR file into your plugins folder and /reload. Then, customize the config file to customize the features to your liking and /reload. That's all!

It doesn't matter which difficulty you set your server on. The difficulty level in your server.properties file determines how much damage monsters do to players and how much damage a player can take from starvation. On "hard" difficulty, zombies can break down wooden doors.

Observations

These are some of the "emergent player behaviors" I've noticed on my test server. You can probably expect some of the same on your own servers. :)

• Players die LOTS, but those who don't rage-quit say thank you for the challenge.

• Players build almost entirely with wood, which is the opposite of most servers where players build mostly with cobblestone and stone brick. I almost never see anything made of dirt, and stone appears rarely as an "accent" to the build design rather than the main ingredient.

• Players tend to leave more of the environment as-is, and build around it. I've seen many builds which flow with the landscape, which is a major departure from the common "flatten land before building" strategy seen on most servers.

• Caves are often littered with cobwebs, which lend a creepy feel. I guess players don't bother to remove the webs in most cases.

• I often see plank bridges, wooden stairs, and sometimes ladders in natural caverns, which is very cool to see because it's obvious where players have explored and how they've made investments. I see some evidence of players reshaping caverns very selectively, but it's rare.

• Players don't litter their yards with torches. Instead, they build tiny lanterns, jack-o-lanterns, or other lighting enclosures.

• Sea level bridges, bridges across a trenches, and single-block towers are rare because they're difficult to build.

• Players aren't building giant, ugly blocks in the sky for the purpose of spawning monsters.

• I almost never see a mining tunnel. Sometimes a jagged mess of cobble, which I assume is due to TNT mining or combat explosions.

• Players trade dyes and sometimes ice. Cobble and stone are in limited supply, and I've seen them traded as well.

Recommended Plugins

• For anti-grief, avoid plugins that disable explosions entirely, because that will undermine the cave-in mechanic and the new improved TNT. I recommend Grief Prevention because it allows explosive block destruction only under sea level, so players get all the fun + challenge, and griefers can't ugly-up the world's surface.

• Avoid plugins which allow players to teleport themselves out of danger when they're in combat or lost. Especially avoid plugins which add commands like /home, /back, and /tpa, since they will undermine the difficulty VERY much. Consider instead a teleportation plugin like Population Density, which allows players to teleport only between teleportation posts it places on the surface every 400 blocks.

Donations

I spend a lot of my free time designing, developing, testing, and discussing this plugin to make Minecraft last longer for all players. If you like this plugin, please consider sending me $5 by clicking the blue "donate" link at the top of this page. :) Thanks!

These guys are kind enough to host the test server for this plugin. They have a great web console and quick ticket response.